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Hands as the Language of Thought: Correcting a Kant Attribution
There is a line about hands that travels well. It reads cleanly, carries an air of philosophical dignity, and arrives in print wearing the name of Immanuel Kant. “The hand is the visible part of the brain,” runs the most common English form, or, in an older rendering, “the hand is the outer brain of man.” The phrase appears in publishing copy, in teaching materials, on Goodreads quotation pages, in popular psychology, in surgical textbooks, in neurology lectures, and in essays on sign language and gesture. It has the shape of something Kant should have said. The difficulty is that no reliable evidence supports treating it as a verified Kant statement.
This is a small instance in the larger pathology of quotation culture, where an author’s prestige is borrowed to underwrite a sentence he never wrote. The case of the hand, though, carries particular weight, because the sentence is invoked precisely where philosophical authority is wanted, in discussions of embodiment, cognition, touch, manual skill, and the expressive life of the hand. Writers reach for Kant when they want to seal the argument. If the seal is counterfeit, the argument has to stand on its own, and the discipline has to notice the forgery.
What Kant Actually Wrote About Hands
Kant wrote about hands more than once, and he wrote about them carefully. In 1768, in his short essay Von dem ersten Grunde des Unterschiedes der Gegenden im Raume, he uses the human hand as his signature example of incongruent counterparts, two objects that share all internal geometric properties and still cannot be superimposed on one another. A right hand and a left hand have identical measurements, identical topology, identical internal relations, and still they will not coincide. The example exposes something about absolute space that relational accounts cannot accommodate. The hand, in this essay, functions as a philosophical instrument, a test case for the metaphysics of orientation.
Thirty years later, in the Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht of 1798, Kant returns to the hand through a different doorway. There he treats the sense of touch, seated in the fingertips and their nerve endings, as the sense that allows the human being to work out the three-dimensional shape of a solid body through direct contact. Kant goes so far as to say that without this organ-sense no concept of corporeal shape could be formed at all. Touch, in the Anthropology, carries a cognitive load that vision alone cannot sustain.
These are recognizable Kant passages, and they are philosophically rich. They give the hand a significant role in his thinking about space, orientation, embodiment, and the conditions under which objects become objects for us. What they do not give us is the famous sentence now repeated in his name.
The Authority Behind the Attribution
The trail of the attribution leads to a specific book published in 1925 by David Katz. A biographical note earns its place here, because Katz’s authority is what carried the Kant line forward for a century, and the weight of that authority bears directly on how the legend survived.
Katz was born in Kassel on 1 October 1884 into a Jewish family, and he studied at Göttingen from 1902 under Georg Elias Müller, whose institute was among the leading centers of experimental psychology in Europe. He took his doctorate at Göttingen in 1906 with a dissertation on the psychology of temporal comparison, and he served as Müller’s assistant from 1907 to 1919, with his volunteer service in the First World War interrupting that work from 1914 to 1918. His 1911 habilitation on color perception, later published as Die Erscheinungsweisen der Farben, was examined by Müller and by Edmund Husserl. That second reviewer matters here, because it places Katz directly inside the phenomenological tradition at its source, with Husserl himself certifying the 1911 work. After the First World War, Katz spent a short stretch at the Technical University of Hannover on the psychology of prosthetic limbs for wounded veterans, a subject that bears on the concerns of the 1925 book more than has generally been noticed.
From 1919 until 1933, Katz held the chair of psychology and education at Rostock, and in 1933 the Nazi regime stripped him of that position. He moved first to Manchester, where he worked in T. H. Pear’s laboratory on tactile and gustatory perception, then briefly in London, and in 1937 he took the first Swedish chair of psychology at Stockholm University, the Eneroth chair, becoming a Swedish citizen the same year. He presided over the Thirteenth International Congress of Psychology in Stockholm in 1951 and died there on 2 February 1953. The figure whose 1925 sentence about Kant and the hand has been circulating, unchecked, for a century was a serious psychologist with phenomenological credentials certified by Husserl and a research record that runs from color to touch to prosthetics to Gestalt. That is the weight the undocumented attribution has been carrying.
Where the Quotation Actually Comes From
In Der Aufbau der Tastwelt, or The World of Touch, Katz writes that Kant once called the hand das äußere Gehirn des Menschen, the outer brain of man. That passage is where most modern quotation chains terminate when traced backward with any rigor. The English variant “the visible part of the brain” appears to be a loose later translation of the Katz-transmitted German phrase, carrying the same undocumented attribution into new languages without retrieving a new source.
Two features of the Katz passage matter. First, Katz supplies no citation to any Kant text. He provides no volume, no essay, no letter, no lecture transcript. He states the attribution as received wisdom and moves on. Second, the footnote that sits at precisely that point in the Katz text does not lead the reader to Kant at all. It leads to Gerhart Hauptmann, the Nobel-laureate playwright, whose prose passage on the hand Katz quotes in an exalted, almost liturgical register. The Kant attribution and the Hauptmann citation share a footnote, and the Kant portion of that pairing goes undocumented.
That is the entire basis, so far as the scholarship can currently establish, for the modern circulation of the line as a Kant quotation. A single undocumented attribution in a 1925 monograph on touch, carrying all the authority of a Husserl-certified Göttingen psychologist with a major research record, absorbed into the secondary literature, and repeated without verification for a century.
Why the Quotation Travels So Well
The sentence survives because it sounds like Kant. The compression is Kantian in style. Sensation, cognition, and anatomy bind together in a single gesture. The cadence matches the tone of the Anthropology passage on touch closely enough that a reader who encounters both in the same afternoon will remember them as a single thought. The line also carries the epigrammatic finish that quotation culture demands.
The phrase travels because it pays an intellectual tax that many writers want paid. When someone argues that the hand is a thinking organ, or that manual skill shapes cognition, or that touch is constitutive of our grasp of the world, Kant’s name closes the argument faster than a paragraph of evidence. The quotation does the work of a citation without requiring a citation to exist.
There is a further, less obvious reason for the sentence’s stubborn life. It has a ready home in at least four disciplines that want it to be Kantian. Philosophers of embodied cognition cite it against Cartesian disembodiment. Hand surgeons and occupational therapists lean on the line to dignify their practice. Neurology textbooks reach for it in their introductions to motor cortex maps. Teachers of signed languages sometimes mobilize a version of it in arguments that signed languages are languages of the hand as the mind’s direct instrument. Each of these fields has a stake in keeping the line in circulation, and none of them has a native incentive to audit its provenance.
The Scholarly Correction
A careful study of the hand in Kant, published in a Hungarian philosophical journal at Eszterházy Károly University, observes that the hand never becomes an explicit, thematic center of Kant’s philosophy in the way that later phenomenology would make it. Merleau-Ponty takes up the hand as a chiasmic site of touching and being touched. Heidegger develops handedness, Zuhandenheit, as a defining feature of the being of equipment. Husserl analyzes the double sensation of one hand touching the other. These are explicit philosophical theses about the hand. The hand, in Kant, plays a different role from the thematic centrality later phenomenology will give it. It appears as an example, a test case, and a sense-organ of decisive cognitive importance, which is already a great deal, though it falls short of the hand-centered metaphysics the misattributed quotation implies.
The quotation legend, though small, distorts philosophy. It suggests that Kant produced a compressed aphorism on the hand as the extension of the mind. What the actual texts show is something else: a careful argument about incongruent counterparts in 1768, and a careful account of touch as shape-sense in 1798. The misattributed sentence flattens both arguments into a Hallmark version of themselves, and then hangs the name Kant on the flattened version.
The Responsible Formula
Writers who want Kantian authority without philological error have a narrow path open to them. The 1768 essay on incongruent counterparts grounds the claim that Kant treated the hand as a philosophically significant object. The Anthropology of 1798 grounds the claim that Kant treated touch, seated in the fingertips, as cognitively constitutive of our concept of bodily shape. Writers who wish to credit Kant with the aphorism about the outer brain can honestly describe it as a twentieth-century attribution traceable at least to David Katz in 1925, for which no secure primary Kant passage has yet been established. The formula runs longer than the elegant false quotation, and it will not fit on a poster, though it has the advantage of being accurate.
The broader point reaches past Kant. Quotation legends grow because the citation economy rewards speed and punishes verification. A writer who takes the time to trace a line to its actual source pays a cost in word count, in footnotes, and in the appearance of pedantry. A writer who accepts the received attribution on trust pays no such cost, and the received attribution grows stronger with every unverified repetition. Over a century, a footnote in a book on touch becomes a Kant quotation in a surgical textbook, and the discipline stops noticing.
Hands, Thought, and Signed Languages
One further reason to care about this correction comes from the linguistics of American Sign Language and the other signed languages of the world. The proposition that the hand is the mind’s instrument is no idle metaphor in Deaf communities or among sign linguists. The hand is the articulatory site of natural human languages with their own phonology, morphology, and syntax, documented since William Stokoe’s 1960 Sign Language Structure opened the field of sign linguistics. Signed languages are languages of the hand in a literal, structural sense, and the evidence for that structural status is empirical and extensive.
When the falsely attributed Kant line is imported into defenses of signed language, or into gestural theories of cognition, it smuggles in a spurious authority and obscures the actual argument. The work has what it needs already, which is the record of the languages themselves and the descriptive and theoretical work of the linguists who study them. Kant’s signature adds nothing to that record. A fake Kant quotation weakens the record by mortgaging the argument to a line that will not survive a footnote check. Signed languages deserve better citation hygiene than quotation culture has given them.
Conclusion
The hand has a real place in Kant’s philosophy. It is the example that cracks open absolute space in 1768. It becomes the organ of touch that makes three-dimensional shape thinkable in 1798. Those two passages are worth reading and worth quoting in Kant’s name. The third sentence, the famous one about the hand as the visible or outer part of the brain, is a twentieth-century attribution that has outrun its evidence. Responsible writing can name it for what it is, a Katz-transmitted attribution from 1925 with no verified Kant source behind it. The legend will keep moving, because legends do, though it does not have to move through our pages unchallenged. A sentence about hands deserves to be held in the hand and checked.
#asl #attribution #concept #hands #history #kant #knowing #meaning #philosophy #research #thought -
Hands as the Language of Thought: Correcting a Kant Attribution
There is a line about hands that travels well. It reads cleanly, carries an air of philosophical dignity, and arrives in print wearing the name of Immanuel Kant. “The hand is the visible part of the brain,” runs the most common English form, or, in an older rendering, “the hand is the outer brain of man.” The phrase appears in publishing copy, in teaching materials, on Goodreads quotation pages, in popular psychology, in surgical textbooks, in neurology lectures, and in essays on sign language and gesture. It has the shape of something Kant should have said. The difficulty is that no reliable evidence supports treating it as a verified Kant statement.
This is a small instance in the larger pathology of quotation culture, where an author’s prestige is borrowed to underwrite a sentence he never wrote. The case of the hand, though, carries particular weight, because the sentence is invoked precisely where philosophical authority is wanted, in discussions of embodiment, cognition, touch, manual skill, and the expressive life of the hand. Writers reach for Kant when they want to seal the argument. If the seal is counterfeit, the argument has to stand on its own, and the discipline has to notice the forgery.
What Kant Actually Wrote About Hands
Kant wrote about hands more than once, and he wrote about them carefully. In 1768, in his short essay Von dem ersten Grunde des Unterschiedes der Gegenden im Raume, he uses the human hand as his signature example of incongruent counterparts, two objects that share all internal geometric properties and still cannot be superimposed on one another. A right hand and a left hand have identical measurements, identical topology, identical internal relations, and still they will not coincide. The example exposes something about absolute space that relational accounts cannot accommodate. The hand, in this essay, functions as a philosophical instrument, a test case for the metaphysics of orientation.
Thirty years later, in the Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht of 1798, Kant returns to the hand through a different doorway. There he treats the sense of touch, seated in the fingertips and their nerve endings, as the sense that allows the human being to work out the three-dimensional shape of a solid body through direct contact. Kant goes so far as to say that without this organ-sense no concept of corporeal shape could be formed at all. Touch, in the Anthropology, carries a cognitive load that vision alone cannot sustain.
These are recognizable Kant passages, and they are philosophically rich. They give the hand a significant role in his thinking about space, orientation, embodiment, and the conditions under which objects become objects for us. What they do not give us is the famous sentence now repeated in his name.
The Authority Behind the Attribution
The trail of the attribution leads to a specific book published in 1925 by David Katz. A biographical note earns its place here, because Katz’s authority is what carried the Kant line forward for a century, and the weight of that authority bears directly on how the legend survived.
Katz was born in Kassel on 1 October 1884 into a Jewish family, and he studied at Göttingen from 1902 under Georg Elias Müller, whose institute was among the leading centers of experimental psychology in Europe. He took his doctorate at Göttingen in 1906 with a dissertation on the psychology of temporal comparison, and he served as Müller’s assistant from 1907 to 1919, with his volunteer service in the First World War interrupting that work from 1914 to 1918. His 1911 habilitation on color perception, later published as Die Erscheinungsweisen der Farben, was examined by Müller and by Edmund Husserl. That second reviewer matters here, because it places Katz directly inside the phenomenological tradition at its source, with Husserl himself certifying the 1911 work. After the First World War, Katz spent a short stretch at the Technical University of Hannover on the psychology of prosthetic limbs for wounded veterans, a subject that bears on the concerns of the 1925 book more than has generally been noticed.
From 1919 until 1933, Katz held the chair of psychology and education at Rostock, and in 1933 the Nazi regime stripped him of that position. He moved first to Manchester, where he worked in T. H. Pear’s laboratory on tactile and gustatory perception, then briefly in London, and in 1937 he took the first Swedish chair of psychology at Stockholm University, the Eneroth chair, becoming a Swedish citizen the same year. He presided over the Thirteenth International Congress of Psychology in Stockholm in 1951 and died there on 2 February 1953. The figure whose 1925 sentence about Kant and the hand has been circulating, unchecked, for a century was a serious psychologist with phenomenological credentials certified by Husserl and a research record that runs from color to touch to prosthetics to Gestalt. That is the weight the undocumented attribution has been carrying.
Where the Quotation Actually Comes From
In Der Aufbau der Tastwelt, or The World of Touch, Katz writes that Kant once called the hand das äußere Gehirn des Menschen, the outer brain of man. That passage is where most modern quotation chains terminate when traced backward with any rigor. The English variant “the visible part of the brain” appears to be a loose later translation of the Katz-transmitted German phrase, carrying the same undocumented attribution into new languages without retrieving a new source.
Two features of the Katz passage matter. First, Katz supplies no citation to any Kant text. He provides no volume, no essay, no letter, no lecture transcript. He states the attribution as received wisdom and moves on. Second, the footnote that sits at precisely that point in the Katz text does not lead the reader to Kant at all. It leads to Gerhart Hauptmann, the Nobel-laureate playwright, whose prose passage on the hand Katz quotes in an exalted, almost liturgical register. The Kant attribution and the Hauptmann citation share a footnote, and the Kant portion of that pairing goes undocumented.
That is the entire basis, so far as the scholarship can currently establish, for the modern circulation of the line as a Kant quotation. A single undocumented attribution in a 1925 monograph on touch, carrying all the authority of a Husserl-certified Göttingen psychologist with a major research record, absorbed into the secondary literature, and repeated without verification for a century.
Why the Quotation Travels So Well
The sentence survives because it sounds like Kant. The compression is Kantian in style. Sensation, cognition, and anatomy bind together in a single gesture. The cadence matches the tone of the Anthropology passage on touch closely enough that a reader who encounters both in the same afternoon will remember them as a single thought. The line also carries the epigrammatic finish that quotation culture demands.
The phrase travels because it pays an intellectual tax that many writers want paid. When someone argues that the hand is a thinking organ, or that manual skill shapes cognition, or that touch is constitutive of our grasp of the world, Kant’s name closes the argument faster than a paragraph of evidence. The quotation does the work of a citation without requiring a citation to exist.
There is a further, less obvious reason for the sentence’s stubborn life. It has a ready home in at least four disciplines that want it to be Kantian. Philosophers of embodied cognition cite it against Cartesian disembodiment. Hand surgeons and occupational therapists lean on the line to dignify their practice. Neurology textbooks reach for it in their introductions to motor cortex maps. Teachers of signed languages sometimes mobilize a version of it in arguments that signed languages are languages of the hand as the mind’s direct instrument. Each of these fields has a stake in keeping the line in circulation, and none of them has a native incentive to audit its provenance.
The Scholarly Correction
A careful study of the hand in Kant, published in a Hungarian philosophical journal at Eszterházy Károly University, observes that the hand never becomes an explicit, thematic center of Kant’s philosophy in the way that later phenomenology would make it. Merleau-Ponty takes up the hand as a chiasmic site of touching and being touched. Heidegger develops handedness, Zuhandenheit, as a defining feature of the being of equipment. Husserl analyzes the double sensation of one hand touching the other. These are explicit philosophical theses about the hand. The hand, in Kant, plays a different role from the thematic centrality later phenomenology will give it. It appears as an example, a test case, and a sense-organ of decisive cognitive importance, which is already a great deal, though it falls short of the hand-centered metaphysics the misattributed quotation implies.
The quotation legend, though small, distorts philosophy. It suggests that Kant produced a compressed aphorism on the hand as the extension of the mind. What the actual texts show is something else: a careful argument about incongruent counterparts in 1768, and a careful account of touch as shape-sense in 1798. The misattributed sentence flattens both arguments into a Hallmark version of themselves, and then hangs the name Kant on the flattened version.
The Responsible Formula
Writers who want Kantian authority without philological error have a narrow path open to them. The 1768 essay on incongruent counterparts grounds the claim that Kant treated the hand as a philosophically significant object. The Anthropology of 1798 grounds the claim that Kant treated touch, seated in the fingertips, as cognitively constitutive of our concept of bodily shape. Writers who wish to credit Kant with the aphorism about the outer brain can honestly describe it as a twentieth-century attribution traceable at least to David Katz in 1925, for which no secure primary Kant passage has yet been established. The formula runs longer than the elegant false quotation, and it will not fit on a poster, though it has the advantage of being accurate.
The broader point reaches past Kant. Quotation legends grow because the citation economy rewards speed and punishes verification. A writer who takes the time to trace a line to its actual source pays a cost in word count, in footnotes, and in the appearance of pedantry. A writer who accepts the received attribution on trust pays no such cost, and the received attribution grows stronger with every unverified repetition. Over a century, a footnote in a book on touch becomes a Kant quotation in a surgical textbook, and the discipline stops noticing.
Hands, Thought, and Signed Languages
One further reason to care about this correction comes from the linguistics of American Sign Language and the other signed languages of the world. The proposition that the hand is the mind’s instrument is no idle metaphor in Deaf communities or among sign linguists. The hand is the articulatory site of natural human languages with their own phonology, morphology, and syntax, documented since William Stokoe’s 1960 Sign Language Structure opened the field of sign linguistics. Signed languages are languages of the hand in a literal, structural sense, and the evidence for that structural status is empirical and extensive.
When the falsely attributed Kant line is imported into defenses of signed language, or into gestural theories of cognition, it smuggles in a spurious authority and obscures the actual argument. The work has what it needs already, which is the record of the languages themselves and the descriptive and theoretical work of the linguists who study them. Kant’s signature adds nothing to that record. A fake Kant quotation weakens the record by mortgaging the argument to a line that will not survive a footnote check. Signed languages deserve better citation hygiene than quotation culture has given them.
Conclusion
The hand has a real place in Kant’s philosophy. It is the example that cracks open absolute space in 1768. It becomes the organ of touch that makes three-dimensional shape thinkable in 1798. Those two passages are worth reading and worth quoting in Kant’s name. The third sentence, the famous one about the hand as the visible or outer part of the brain, is a twentieth-century attribution that has outrun its evidence. Responsible writing can name it for what it is, a Katz-transmitted attribution from 1925 with no verified Kant source behind it. The legend will keep moving, because legends do, though it does not have to move through our pages unchallenged. A sentence about hands deserves to be held in the hand and checked.
#asl #attribution #concept #hands #history #kant #knowing #meaning #philosophy #research #thought -
Hands as the Language of Thought: Correcting a Kant Attribution
There is a line about hands that travels well. It reads cleanly, carries an air of philosophical dignity, and arrives in print wearing the name of Immanuel Kant. “The hand is the visible part of the brain,” runs the most common English form, or, in an older rendering, “the hand is the outer brain of man.” The phrase appears in publishing copy, in teaching materials, on Goodreads quotation pages, in popular psychology, in surgical textbooks, in neurology lectures, and in essays on sign language and gesture. It has the shape of something Kant should have said. The difficulty is that no reliable evidence supports treating it as a verified Kant statement.
This is a small instance in the larger pathology of quotation culture, where an author’s prestige is borrowed to underwrite a sentence he never wrote. The case of the hand, though, carries particular weight, because the sentence is invoked precisely where philosophical authority is wanted, in discussions of embodiment, cognition, touch, manual skill, and the expressive life of the hand. Writers reach for Kant when they want to seal the argument. If the seal is counterfeit, the argument has to stand on its own, and the discipline has to notice the forgery.
What Kant Actually Wrote About Hands
Kant wrote about hands more than once, and he wrote about them carefully. In 1768, in his short essay Von dem ersten Grunde des Unterschiedes der Gegenden im Raume, he uses the human hand as his signature example of incongruent counterparts, two objects that share all internal geometric properties and still cannot be superimposed on one another. A right hand and a left hand have identical measurements, identical topology, identical internal relations, and still they will not coincide. The example exposes something about absolute space that relational accounts cannot accommodate. The hand, in this essay, functions as a philosophical instrument, a test case for the metaphysics of orientation.
Thirty years later, in the Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht of 1798, Kant returns to the hand through a different doorway. There he treats the sense of touch, seated in the fingertips and their nerve endings, as the sense that allows the human being to work out the three-dimensional shape of a solid body through direct contact. Kant goes so far as to say that without this organ-sense no concept of corporeal shape could be formed at all. Touch, in the Anthropology, carries a cognitive load that vision alone cannot sustain.
These are recognizable Kant passages, and they are philosophically rich. They give the hand a significant role in his thinking about space, orientation, embodiment, and the conditions under which objects become objects for us. What they do not give us is the famous sentence now repeated in his name.
The Authority Behind the Attribution
The trail of the attribution leads to a specific book published in 1925 by David Katz. A biographical note earns its place here, because Katz’s authority is what carried the Kant line forward for a century, and the weight of that authority bears directly on how the legend survived.
Katz was born in Kassel on 1 October 1884 into a Jewish family, and he studied at Göttingen from 1902 under Georg Elias Müller, whose institute was among the leading centers of experimental psychology in Europe. He took his doctorate at Göttingen in 1906 with a dissertation on the psychology of temporal comparison, and he served as Müller’s assistant from 1907 to 1919, with his volunteer service in the First World War interrupting that work from 1914 to 1918. His 1911 habilitation on color perception, later published as Die Erscheinungsweisen der Farben, was examined by Müller and by Edmund Husserl. That second reviewer matters here, because it places Katz directly inside the phenomenological tradition at its source, with Husserl himself certifying the 1911 work. After the First World War, Katz spent a short stretch at the Technical University of Hannover on the psychology of prosthetic limbs for wounded veterans, a subject that bears on the concerns of the 1925 book more than has generally been noticed.
From 1919 until 1933, Katz held the chair of psychology and education at Rostock, and in 1933 the Nazi regime stripped him of that position. He moved first to Manchester, where he worked in T. H. Pear’s laboratory on tactile and gustatory perception, then briefly in London, and in 1937 he took the first Swedish chair of psychology at Stockholm University, the Eneroth chair, becoming a Swedish citizen the same year. He presided over the Thirteenth International Congress of Psychology in Stockholm in 1951 and died there on 2 February 1953. The figure whose 1925 sentence about Kant and the hand has been circulating, unchecked, for a century was a serious psychologist with phenomenological credentials certified by Husserl and a research record that runs from color to touch to prosthetics to Gestalt. That is the weight the undocumented attribution has been carrying.
Where the Quotation Actually Comes From
In Der Aufbau der Tastwelt, or The World of Touch, Katz writes that Kant once called the hand das äußere Gehirn des Menschen, the outer brain of man. That passage is where most modern quotation chains terminate when traced backward with any rigor. The English variant “the visible part of the brain” appears to be a loose later translation of the Katz-transmitted German phrase, carrying the same undocumented attribution into new languages without retrieving a new source.
Two features of the Katz passage matter. First, Katz supplies no citation to any Kant text. He provides no volume, no essay, no letter, no lecture transcript. He states the attribution as received wisdom and moves on. Second, the footnote that sits at precisely that point in the Katz text does not lead the reader to Kant at all. It leads to Gerhart Hauptmann, the Nobel-laureate playwright, whose prose passage on the hand Katz quotes in an exalted, almost liturgical register. The Kant attribution and the Hauptmann citation share a footnote, and the Kant portion of that pairing goes undocumented.
That is the entire basis, so far as the scholarship can currently establish, for the modern circulation of the line as a Kant quotation. A single undocumented attribution in a 1925 monograph on touch, carrying all the authority of a Husserl-certified Göttingen psychologist with a major research record, absorbed into the secondary literature, and repeated without verification for a century.
Why the Quotation Travels So Well
The sentence survives because it sounds like Kant. The compression is Kantian in style. Sensation, cognition, and anatomy bind together in a single gesture. The cadence matches the tone of the Anthropology passage on touch closely enough that a reader who encounters both in the same afternoon will remember them as a single thought. The line also carries the epigrammatic finish that quotation culture demands.
The phrase travels because it pays an intellectual tax that many writers want paid. When someone argues that the hand is a thinking organ, or that manual skill shapes cognition, or that touch is constitutive of our grasp of the world, Kant’s name closes the argument faster than a paragraph of evidence. The quotation does the work of a citation without requiring a citation to exist.
There is a further, less obvious reason for the sentence’s stubborn life. It has a ready home in at least four disciplines that want it to be Kantian. Philosophers of embodied cognition cite it against Cartesian disembodiment. Hand surgeons and occupational therapists lean on the line to dignify their practice. Neurology textbooks reach for it in their introductions to motor cortex maps. Teachers of signed languages sometimes mobilize a version of it in arguments that signed languages are languages of the hand as the mind’s direct instrument. Each of these fields has a stake in keeping the line in circulation, and none of them has a native incentive to audit its provenance.
The Scholarly Correction
A careful study of the hand in Kant, published in a Hungarian philosophical journal at Eszterházy Károly University, observes that the hand never becomes an explicit, thematic center of Kant’s philosophy in the way that later phenomenology would make it. Merleau-Ponty takes up the hand as a chiasmic site of touching and being touched. Heidegger develops handedness, Zuhandenheit, as a defining feature of the being of equipment. Husserl analyzes the double sensation of one hand touching the other. These are explicit philosophical theses about the hand. The hand, in Kant, plays a different role from the thematic centrality later phenomenology will give it. It appears as an example, a test case, and a sense-organ of decisive cognitive importance, which is already a great deal, though it falls short of the hand-centered metaphysics the misattributed quotation implies.
The quotation legend, though small, distorts philosophy. It suggests that Kant produced a compressed aphorism on the hand as the extension of the mind. What the actual texts show is something else: a careful argument about incongruent counterparts in 1768, and a careful account of touch as shape-sense in 1798. The misattributed sentence flattens both arguments into a Hallmark version of themselves, and then hangs the name Kant on the flattened version.
The Responsible Formula
Writers who want Kantian authority without philological error have a narrow path open to them. The 1768 essay on incongruent counterparts grounds the claim that Kant treated the hand as a philosophically significant object. The Anthropology of 1798 grounds the claim that Kant treated touch, seated in the fingertips, as cognitively constitutive of our concept of bodily shape. Writers who wish to credit Kant with the aphorism about the outer brain can honestly describe it as a twentieth-century attribution traceable at least to David Katz in 1925, for which no secure primary Kant passage has yet been established. The formula runs longer than the elegant false quotation, and it will not fit on a poster, though it has the advantage of being accurate.
The broader point reaches past Kant. Quotation legends grow because the citation economy rewards speed and punishes verification. A writer who takes the time to trace a line to its actual source pays a cost in word count, in footnotes, and in the appearance of pedantry. A writer who accepts the received attribution on trust pays no such cost, and the received attribution grows stronger with every unverified repetition. Over a century, a footnote in a book on touch becomes a Kant quotation in a surgical textbook, and the discipline stops noticing.
Hands, Thought, and Signed Languages
One further reason to care about this correction comes from the linguistics of American Sign Language and the other signed languages of the world. The proposition that the hand is the mind’s instrument is no idle metaphor in Deaf communities or among sign linguists. The hand is the articulatory site of natural human languages with their own phonology, morphology, and syntax, documented since William Stokoe’s 1960 Sign Language Structure opened the field of sign linguistics. Signed languages are languages of the hand in a literal, structural sense, and the evidence for that structural status is empirical and extensive.
When the falsely attributed Kant line is imported into defenses of signed language, or into gestural theories of cognition, it smuggles in a spurious authority and obscures the actual argument. The work has what it needs already, which is the record of the languages themselves and the descriptive and theoretical work of the linguists who study them. Kant’s signature adds nothing to that record. A fake Kant quotation weakens the record by mortgaging the argument to a line that will not survive a footnote check. Signed languages deserve better citation hygiene than quotation culture has given them.
Conclusion
The hand has a real place in Kant’s philosophy. It is the example that cracks open absolute space in 1768. It becomes the organ of touch that makes three-dimensional shape thinkable in 1798. Those two passages are worth reading and worth quoting in Kant’s name. The third sentence, the famous one about the hand as the visible or outer part of the brain, is a twentieth-century attribution that has outrun its evidence. Responsible writing can name it for what it is, a Katz-transmitted attribution from 1925 with no verified Kant source behind it. The legend will keep moving, because legends do, though it does not have to move through our pages unchallenged. A sentence about hands deserves to be held in the hand and checked.
#asl #attribution #concept #hands #history #kant #knowing #meaning #philosophy #research #thought -
Hands as the Language of Thought: Correcting a Kant Attribution
There is a line about hands that travels well. It reads cleanly, carries an air of philosophical dignity, and arrives in print wearing the name of Immanuel Kant. “The hand is the visible part of the brain,” runs the most common English form, or, in an older rendering, “the hand is the outer brain of man.” The phrase appears in publishing copy, in teaching materials, on Goodreads quotation pages, in popular psychology, in surgical textbooks, in neurology lectures, and in essays on sign language and gesture. It has the shape of something Kant should have said. The difficulty is that no reliable evidence supports treating it as a verified Kant statement.
This is a small instance in the larger pathology of quotation culture, where an author’s prestige is borrowed to underwrite a sentence he never wrote. The case of the hand, though, carries particular weight, because the sentence is invoked precisely where philosophical authority is wanted, in discussions of embodiment, cognition, touch, manual skill, and the expressive life of the hand. Writers reach for Kant when they want to seal the argument. If the seal is counterfeit, the argument has to stand on its own, and the discipline has to notice the forgery.
What Kant Actually Wrote About Hands
Kant wrote about hands more than once, and he wrote about them carefully. In 1768, in his short essay Von dem ersten Grunde des Unterschiedes der Gegenden im Raume, he uses the human hand as his signature example of incongruent counterparts, two objects that share all internal geometric properties and still cannot be superimposed on one another. A right hand and a left hand have identical measurements, identical topology, identical internal relations, and still they will not coincide. The example exposes something about absolute space that relational accounts cannot accommodate. The hand, in this essay, functions as a philosophical instrument, a test case for the metaphysics of orientation.
Thirty years later, in the Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht of 1798, Kant returns to the hand through a different doorway. There he treats the sense of touch, seated in the fingertips and their nerve endings, as the sense that allows the human being to work out the three-dimensional shape of a solid body through direct contact. Kant goes so far as to say that without this organ-sense no concept of corporeal shape could be formed at all. Touch, in the Anthropology, carries a cognitive load that vision alone cannot sustain.
These are recognizable Kant passages, and they are philosophically rich. They give the hand a significant role in his thinking about space, orientation, embodiment, and the conditions under which objects become objects for us. What they do not give us is the famous sentence now repeated in his name.
The Authority Behind the Attribution
The trail of the attribution leads to a specific book published in 1925 by David Katz. A biographical note earns its place here, because Katz’s authority is what carried the Kant line forward for a century, and the weight of that authority bears directly on how the legend survived.
Katz was born in Kassel on 1 October 1884 into a Jewish family, and he studied at Göttingen from 1902 under Georg Elias Müller, whose institute was among the leading centers of experimental psychology in Europe. He took his doctorate at Göttingen in 1906 with a dissertation on the psychology of temporal comparison, and he served as Müller’s assistant from 1907 to 1919, with his volunteer service in the First World War interrupting that work from 1914 to 1918. His 1911 habilitation on color perception, later published as Die Erscheinungsweisen der Farben, was examined by Müller and by Edmund Husserl. That second reviewer matters here, because it places Katz directly inside the phenomenological tradition at its source, with Husserl himself certifying the 1911 work. After the First World War, Katz spent a short stretch at the Technical University of Hannover on the psychology of prosthetic limbs for wounded veterans, a subject that bears on the concerns of the 1925 book more than has generally been noticed.
From 1919 until 1933, Katz held the chair of psychology and education at Rostock, and in 1933 the Nazi regime stripped him of that position. He moved first to Manchester, where he worked in T. H. Pear’s laboratory on tactile and gustatory perception, then briefly in London, and in 1937 he took the first Swedish chair of psychology at Stockholm University, the Eneroth chair, becoming a Swedish citizen the same year. He presided over the Thirteenth International Congress of Psychology in Stockholm in 1951 and died there on 2 February 1953. The figure whose 1925 sentence about Kant and the hand has been circulating, unchecked, for a century was a serious psychologist with phenomenological credentials certified by Husserl and a research record that runs from color to touch to prosthetics to Gestalt. That is the weight the undocumented attribution has been carrying.
Where the Quotation Actually Comes From
In Der Aufbau der Tastwelt, or The World of Touch, Katz writes that Kant once called the hand das äußere Gehirn des Menschen, the outer brain of man. That passage is where most modern quotation chains terminate when traced backward with any rigor. The English variant “the visible part of the brain” appears to be a loose later translation of the Katz-transmitted German phrase, carrying the same undocumented attribution into new languages without retrieving a new source.
Two features of the Katz passage matter. First, Katz supplies no citation to any Kant text. He provides no volume, no essay, no letter, no lecture transcript. He states the attribution as received wisdom and moves on. Second, the footnote that sits at precisely that point in the Katz text does not lead the reader to Kant at all. It leads to Gerhart Hauptmann, the Nobel-laureate playwright, whose prose passage on the hand Katz quotes in an exalted, almost liturgical register. The Kant attribution and the Hauptmann citation share a footnote, and the Kant portion of that pairing goes undocumented.
That is the entire basis, so far as the scholarship can currently establish, for the modern circulation of the line as a Kant quotation. A single undocumented attribution in a 1925 monograph on touch, carrying all the authority of a Husserl-certified Göttingen psychologist with a major research record, absorbed into the secondary literature, and repeated without verification for a century.
Why the Quotation Travels So Well
The sentence survives because it sounds like Kant. The compression is Kantian in style. Sensation, cognition, and anatomy bind together in a single gesture. The cadence matches the tone of the Anthropology passage on touch closely enough that a reader who encounters both in the same afternoon will remember them as a single thought. The line also carries the epigrammatic finish that quotation culture demands.
The phrase travels because it pays an intellectual tax that many writers want paid. When someone argues that the hand is a thinking organ, or that manual skill shapes cognition, or that touch is constitutive of our grasp of the world, Kant’s name closes the argument faster than a paragraph of evidence. The quotation does the work of a citation without requiring a citation to exist.
There is a further, less obvious reason for the sentence’s stubborn life. It has a ready home in at least four disciplines that want it to be Kantian. Philosophers of embodied cognition cite it against Cartesian disembodiment. Hand surgeons and occupational therapists lean on the line to dignify their practice. Neurology textbooks reach for it in their introductions to motor cortex maps. Teachers of signed languages sometimes mobilize a version of it in arguments that signed languages are languages of the hand as the mind’s direct instrument. Each of these fields has a stake in keeping the line in circulation, and none of them has a native incentive to audit its provenance.
The Scholarly Correction
A careful study of the hand in Kant, published in a Hungarian philosophical journal at Eszterházy Károly University, observes that the hand never becomes an explicit, thematic center of Kant’s philosophy in the way that later phenomenology would make it. Merleau-Ponty takes up the hand as a chiasmic site of touching and being touched. Heidegger develops handedness, Zuhandenheit, as a defining feature of the being of equipment. Husserl analyzes the double sensation of one hand touching the other. These are explicit philosophical theses about the hand. The hand, in Kant, plays a different role from the thematic centrality later phenomenology will give it. It appears as an example, a test case, and a sense-organ of decisive cognitive importance, which is already a great deal, though it falls short of the hand-centered metaphysics the misattributed quotation implies.
The quotation legend, though small, distorts philosophy. It suggests that Kant produced a compressed aphorism on the hand as the extension of the mind. What the actual texts show is something else: a careful argument about incongruent counterparts in 1768, and a careful account of touch as shape-sense in 1798. The misattributed sentence flattens both arguments into a Hallmark version of themselves, and then hangs the name Kant on the flattened version.
The Responsible Formula
Writers who want Kantian authority without philological error have a narrow path open to them. The 1768 essay on incongruent counterparts grounds the claim that Kant treated the hand as a philosophically significant object. The Anthropology of 1798 grounds the claim that Kant treated touch, seated in the fingertips, as cognitively constitutive of our concept of bodily shape. Writers who wish to credit Kant with the aphorism about the outer brain can honestly describe it as a twentieth-century attribution traceable at least to David Katz in 1925, for which no secure primary Kant passage has yet been established. The formula runs longer than the elegant false quotation, and it will not fit on a poster, though it has the advantage of being accurate.
The broader point reaches past Kant. Quotation legends grow because the citation economy rewards speed and punishes verification. A writer who takes the time to trace a line to its actual source pays a cost in word count, in footnotes, and in the appearance of pedantry. A writer who accepts the received attribution on trust pays no such cost, and the received attribution grows stronger with every unverified repetition. Over a century, a footnote in a book on touch becomes a Kant quotation in a surgical textbook, and the discipline stops noticing.
Hands, Thought, and Signed Languages
One further reason to care about this correction comes from the linguistics of American Sign Language and the other signed languages of the world. The proposition that the hand is the mind’s instrument is no idle metaphor in Deaf communities or among sign linguists. The hand is the articulatory site of natural human languages with their own phonology, morphology, and syntax, documented since William Stokoe’s 1960 Sign Language Structure opened the field of sign linguistics. Signed languages are languages of the hand in a literal, structural sense, and the evidence for that structural status is empirical and extensive.
When the falsely attributed Kant line is imported into defenses of signed language, or into gestural theories of cognition, it smuggles in a spurious authority and obscures the actual argument. The work has what it needs already, which is the record of the languages themselves and the descriptive and theoretical work of the linguists who study them. Kant’s signature adds nothing to that record. A fake Kant quotation weakens the record by mortgaging the argument to a line that will not survive a footnote check. Signed languages deserve better citation hygiene than quotation culture has given them.
Conclusion
The hand has a real place in Kant’s philosophy. It is the example that cracks open absolute space in 1768. It becomes the organ of touch that makes three-dimensional shape thinkable in 1798. Those two passages are worth reading and worth quoting in Kant’s name. The third sentence, the famous one about the hand as the visible or outer part of the brain, is a twentieth-century attribution that has outrun its evidence. Responsible writing can name it for what it is, a Katz-transmitted attribution from 1925 with no verified Kant source behind it. The legend will keep moving, because legends do, though it does not have to move through our pages unchallenged. A sentence about hands deserves to be held in the hand and checked.
#asl #attribution #concept #hands #history #kant #knowing #meaning #philosophy #research #thought -
Hands as the Language of Thought: Correcting a Kant Attribution
There is a line about hands that travels well. It reads cleanly, carries an air of philosophical dignity, and arrives in print wearing the name of Immanuel Kant. “The hand is the visible part of the brain,” runs the most common English form, or, in an older rendering, “the hand is the outer brain of man.” The phrase appears in publishing copy, in teaching materials, on Goodreads quotation pages, in popular psychology, in surgical textbooks, in neurology lectures, and in essays on sign language and gesture. It has the shape of something Kant should have said. The difficulty is that no reliable evidence supports treating it as a verified Kant statement.
This is a small instance in the larger pathology of quotation culture, where an author’s prestige is borrowed to underwrite a sentence he never wrote. The case of the hand, though, carries particular weight, because the sentence is invoked precisely where philosophical authority is wanted, in discussions of embodiment, cognition, touch, manual skill, and the expressive life of the hand. Writers reach for Kant when they want to seal the argument. If the seal is counterfeit, the argument has to stand on its own, and the discipline has to notice the forgery.
What Kant Actually Wrote About Hands
Kant wrote about hands more than once, and he wrote about them carefully. In 1768, in his short essay Von dem ersten Grunde des Unterschiedes der Gegenden im Raume, he uses the human hand as his signature example of incongruent counterparts, two objects that share all internal geometric properties and still cannot be superimposed on one another. A right hand and a left hand have identical measurements, identical topology, identical internal relations, and still they will not coincide. The example exposes something about absolute space that relational accounts cannot accommodate. The hand, in this essay, functions as a philosophical instrument, a test case for the metaphysics of orientation.
Thirty years later, in the Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht of 1798, Kant returns to the hand through a different doorway. There he treats the sense of touch, seated in the fingertips and their nerve endings, as the sense that allows the human being to work out the three-dimensional shape of a solid body through direct contact. Kant goes so far as to say that without this organ-sense no concept of corporeal shape could be formed at all. Touch, in the Anthropology, carries a cognitive load that vision alone cannot sustain.
These are recognizable Kant passages, and they are philosophically rich. They give the hand a significant role in his thinking about space, orientation, embodiment, and the conditions under which objects become objects for us. What they do not give us is the famous sentence now repeated in his name.
The Authority Behind the Attribution
The trail of the attribution leads to a specific book published in 1925 by David Katz. A biographical note earns its place here, because Katz’s authority is what carried the Kant line forward for a century, and the weight of that authority bears directly on how the legend survived.
Katz was born in Kassel on 1 October 1884 into a Jewish family, and he studied at Göttingen from 1902 under Georg Elias Müller, whose institute was among the leading centers of experimental psychology in Europe. He took his doctorate at Göttingen in 1906 with a dissertation on the psychology of temporal comparison, and he served as Müller’s assistant from 1907 to 1919, with his volunteer service in the First World War interrupting that work from 1914 to 1918. His 1911 habilitation on color perception, later published as Die Erscheinungsweisen der Farben, was examined by Müller and by Edmund Husserl. That second reviewer matters here, because it places Katz directly inside the phenomenological tradition at its source, with Husserl himself certifying the 1911 work. After the First World War, Katz spent a short stretch at the Technical University of Hannover on the psychology of prosthetic limbs for wounded veterans, a subject that bears on the concerns of the 1925 book more than has generally been noticed.
From 1919 until 1933, Katz held the chair of psychology and education at Rostock, and in 1933 the Nazi regime stripped him of that position. He moved first to Manchester, where he worked in T. H. Pear’s laboratory on tactile and gustatory perception, then briefly in London, and in 1937 he took the first Swedish chair of psychology at Stockholm University, the Eneroth chair, becoming a Swedish citizen the same year. He presided over the Thirteenth International Congress of Psychology in Stockholm in 1951 and died there on 2 February 1953. The figure whose 1925 sentence about Kant and the hand has been circulating, unchecked, for a century was a serious psychologist with phenomenological credentials certified by Husserl and a research record that runs from color to touch to prosthetics to Gestalt. That is the weight the undocumented attribution has been carrying.
Where the Quotation Actually Comes From
In Der Aufbau der Tastwelt, or The World of Touch, Katz writes that Kant once called the hand das äußere Gehirn des Menschen, the outer brain of man. That passage is where most modern quotation chains terminate when traced backward with any rigor. The English variant “the visible part of the brain” appears to be a loose later translation of the Katz-transmitted German phrase, carrying the same undocumented attribution into new languages without retrieving a new source.
Two features of the Katz passage matter. First, Katz supplies no citation to any Kant text. He provides no volume, no essay, no letter, no lecture transcript. He states the attribution as received wisdom and moves on. Second, the footnote that sits at precisely that point in the Katz text does not lead the reader to Kant at all. It leads to Gerhart Hauptmann, the Nobel-laureate playwright, whose prose passage on the hand Katz quotes in an exalted, almost liturgical register. The Kant attribution and the Hauptmann citation share a footnote, and the Kant portion of that pairing goes undocumented.
That is the entire basis, so far as the scholarship can currently establish, for the modern circulation of the line as a Kant quotation. A single undocumented attribution in a 1925 monograph on touch, carrying all the authority of a Husserl-certified Göttingen psychologist with a major research record, absorbed into the secondary literature, and repeated without verification for a century.
Why the Quotation Travels So Well
The sentence survives because it sounds like Kant. The compression is Kantian in style. Sensation, cognition, and anatomy bind together in a single gesture. The cadence matches the tone of the Anthropology passage on touch closely enough that a reader who encounters both in the same afternoon will remember them as a single thought. The line also carries the epigrammatic finish that quotation culture demands.
The phrase travels because it pays an intellectual tax that many writers want paid. When someone argues that the hand is a thinking organ, or that manual skill shapes cognition, or that touch is constitutive of our grasp of the world, Kant’s name closes the argument faster than a paragraph of evidence. The quotation does the work of a citation without requiring a citation to exist.
There is a further, less obvious reason for the sentence’s stubborn life. It has a ready home in at least four disciplines that want it to be Kantian. Philosophers of embodied cognition cite it against Cartesian disembodiment. Hand surgeons and occupational therapists lean on the line to dignify their practice. Neurology textbooks reach for it in their introductions to motor cortex maps. Teachers of signed languages sometimes mobilize a version of it in arguments that signed languages are languages of the hand as the mind’s direct instrument. Each of these fields has a stake in keeping the line in circulation, and none of them has a native incentive to audit its provenance.
The Scholarly Correction
A careful study of the hand in Kant, published in a Hungarian philosophical journal at Eszterházy Károly University, observes that the hand never becomes an explicit, thematic center of Kant’s philosophy in the way that later phenomenology would make it. Merleau-Ponty takes up the hand as a chiasmic site of touching and being touched. Heidegger develops handedness, Zuhandenheit, as a defining feature of the being of equipment. Husserl analyzes the double sensation of one hand touching the other. These are explicit philosophical theses about the hand. The hand, in Kant, plays a different role from the thematic centrality later phenomenology will give it. It appears as an example, a test case, and a sense-organ of decisive cognitive importance, which is already a great deal, though it falls short of the hand-centered metaphysics the misattributed quotation implies.
The quotation legend, though small, distorts philosophy. It suggests that Kant produced a compressed aphorism on the hand as the extension of the mind. What the actual texts show is something else: a careful argument about incongruent counterparts in 1768, and a careful account of touch as shape-sense in 1798. The misattributed sentence flattens both arguments into a Hallmark version of themselves, and then hangs the name Kant on the flattened version.
The Responsible Formula
Writers who want Kantian authority without philological error have a narrow path open to them. The 1768 essay on incongruent counterparts grounds the claim that Kant treated the hand as a philosophically significant object. The Anthropology of 1798 grounds the claim that Kant treated touch, seated in the fingertips, as cognitively constitutive of our concept of bodily shape. Writers who wish to credit Kant with the aphorism about the outer brain can honestly describe it as a twentieth-century attribution traceable at least to David Katz in 1925, for which no secure primary Kant passage has yet been established. The formula runs longer than the elegant false quotation, and it will not fit on a poster, though it has the advantage of being accurate.
The broader point reaches past Kant. Quotation legends grow because the citation economy rewards speed and punishes verification. A writer who takes the time to trace a line to its actual source pays a cost in word count, in footnotes, and in the appearance of pedantry. A writer who accepts the received attribution on trust pays no such cost, and the received attribution grows stronger with every unverified repetition. Over a century, a footnote in a book on touch becomes a Kant quotation in a surgical textbook, and the discipline stops noticing.
Hands, Thought, and Signed Languages
One further reason to care about this correction comes from the linguistics of American Sign Language and the other signed languages of the world. The proposition that the hand is the mind’s instrument is no idle metaphor in Deaf communities or among sign linguists. The hand is the articulatory site of natural human languages with their own phonology, morphology, and syntax, documented since William Stokoe’s 1960 Sign Language Structure opened the field of sign linguistics. Signed languages are languages of the hand in a literal, structural sense, and the evidence for that structural status is empirical and extensive.
When the falsely attributed Kant line is imported into defenses of signed language, or into gestural theories of cognition, it smuggles in a spurious authority and obscures the actual argument. The work has what it needs already, which is the record of the languages themselves and the descriptive and theoretical work of the linguists who study them. Kant’s signature adds nothing to that record. A fake Kant quotation weakens the record by mortgaging the argument to a line that will not survive a footnote check. Signed languages deserve better citation hygiene than quotation culture has given them.
Conclusion
The hand has a real place in Kant’s philosophy. It is the example that cracks open absolute space in 1768. It becomes the organ of touch that makes three-dimensional shape thinkable in 1798. Those two passages are worth reading and worth quoting in Kant’s name. The third sentence, the famous one about the hand as the visible or outer part of the brain, is a twentieth-century attribution that has outrun its evidence. Responsible writing can name it for what it is, a Katz-transmitted attribution from 1925 with no verified Kant source behind it. The legend will keep moving, because legends do, though it does not have to move through our pages unchallenged. A sentence about hands deserves to be held in the hand and checked.
#asl #attribution #concept #hands #history #kant #knowing #meaning #philosophy #research #thought -
we are witnessing history as it is being written down in textbooks for the students of tomorrow
Muchas gracias señor Pedro Sánchez Pérez-Castejón huevos de acero.
-
we are witnessing history as it is being written down in textbooks for the students of tomorrow
Muchas gracias señor Pedro Sánchez Pérez-Castejón huevos de acero.
-
#Glorantha 's LAST Chance | An Open Letter to @[email protected] I’m not deeply enough into #Runequest, although I do have a few #ttrpg books, but none of them came anywhere near matching the excitement of, say, #KingofDragpnPass! The rulebook feels like a tedious history textbook. #RQ #RQG
Glorantha's LAST Chance | An O... -
#Glorantha 's LAST Chance | An Open Letter to @[email protected] I’m not deeply enough into #Runequest, although I do have a few #ttrpg books, but none of them came anywhere near matching the excitement of, say, #KingofDragpnPass! The rulebook feels like a tedious history textbook. #RQ #RQG
Glorantha's LAST Chance | An O... -
#Glorantha 's LAST Chance | An Open Letter to @[email protected] I’m not deeply enough into #Runequest, although I do have a few #ttrpg books, but none of them came anywhere near matching the excitement of, say, #KingofDragpnPass! The rulebook feels like a tedious history textbook. #RQ #RQG
Glorantha's LAST Chance | An O... -
#Glorantha 's LAST Chance | An Open Letter to @[email protected] I’m not deeply enough into #Runequest, although I do have a few #ttrpg books, but none of them came anywhere near matching the excitement of, say, #KingofDragpnPass! The rulebook feels like a tedious history textbook. #RQ #RQG
Glorantha's LAST Chance | An O... -
Want to sound like you've been living in Israel for years?
This is the word that will instantly make your Hebrew sound more authentic and natural.
Israelis have their own way of expressing "exactly" that you won't learn from textbooks or apps -
It's one of those words that immediately signals you understand how Hebrew really works in conversation.
Master this and you'll have another essential piece of real Israeli Hebrew that makes all the difference in how natural you sound.
Part 11 coming soon...
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A fictional Grand Tour portrays Pluto as it really is
NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto has forced astronomers to rewrite their textbooks — but that's not all: New Horizons also forced Les Johnson to rewrite a novel.The space scientist was tasked with taking notes that the famed science-f
https://cosmiclog.com/2025/10/31/a-fictional-grand-tour-portrays-pluto-as-it-really-is/
#FictionScienceClub #Books #Charon #DwarfPlanets #FictionScience #NewHorizons #Pluto #ScienceFiction #Space -
Introduction
On May 25, 2020, police in Minneapolis Minnesota murdered George Floyd in cold blood. Responding to allegations of counterfeit money, police arrested Floyd, with one officer kneeling on his neck for nearly nine minutes, ultimately suffocating him. The killing was captured on video and quickly spread across the internet.
Protests soon followed. The first protest organized in Minneapolis was on May 26. By May 28 the protests had spread to the nearby cities of St Paul and Duluth with riots occurring in Minneaopolis that evening. Mostly notably, the third precinct of the Minneapolis Police Department was besieged and burned. Minnesota activated the National Guard on May 29 in response to the unrest.1 The American state’s disastrous response to COVID-19, massive unemployment, and indiscriminate police killings that disproportionately target people of colour provided the impetus for an enormous and unprecedented outpouring of rage; protests, many of them violently targeting the police, spread across the United States like wildfire.
While the initial uprising was ferocious in its explosive anger and militancy, within just three weeks the protests seem to have been channeled largely into the decidedly less militant demand of “Defund the police.” What happened? I largely agree with what Kandist Mallett wrote in a brilliant article in Teen Vogue, in which she argued that: “those in power…are working tirelessly to destroy this wave of unrest before it becomes a tsunami they cannot control.… They are trying to kill this movement.”2 The defanging of the George Floyd Uprising was not accidental but was rather a deliberate attempt on the part of the American ruling class to regain social control in the wake of the most militant protests in recent memory—and, as a movement, possibly the largest in U.S. history.
What I want to do in this article is to examine the dimensions of how this defanging took place: how, within the space of two weeks, we went from burning down a police station to making small budgetary demands. I argue that the massive effort to defang the George Floyd Uprising should be understood as a deliberate counter-insurgency operation, combining the (sometimes coordinated) efforts of: various police forces, the capitalist media, the American military, NGOs, the Democrats, both state and federal governments, and other liberal establishment figures. What I also want to show is that these efforts were not extraordinary: there was no shadowy conspiracy to intervene. Rather, each of these apparatuses functioned exactly as intended to in order to defend the existing capitalist order. By examining the response to the George Floyd Uprising, the left can gain a better understanding of just how difficult it will be to overthrow capitalism and the capitalist state and potentially avoid pitfalls in the future.
Before continuing, I want to address the initial and most obvious opposition to my argument. If the efforts to defang the protests should be understood as a counter-insurgency, then it stands to reason that the George Floyd Uprising should be considered an insurgency. Is this not hyperbolic? Given the extent of the crisis of legitimacy the protests created for the American state, I do not think it is hyperbolic at all. As Kristian Williams argued in “The other side of the COIN: counterinsurgency and community policing”, insurgency and counter-insurgency is precisely the lens through which the American state views much of its domestic policing activity, from gang-related operations through to protest management.3
The uprising truly created a crisis of legitimacy for the American state. It needs to be stated outright that the burning of a police station and the forced retreat, under siege, of the police inside is unprecedented in the history of modern American protest. The vulnerability of the police was put on full display: the following night police were attacked in Los Angeles and New York, among other locations. The National Guard was deployed throughout the United States. While not as historically unprecedented for dealing with dissent, there were concerns, at least in Minnesota, that the National Guard would be insufficient to quell the uprising. Governor Tim Walz on May 30 in the Minneapolis Star Tribune: “We do not have the numbers… We cannot arrest people when we are trying to hold ground.”4 Three days later, a Senior Airman in the Minnesota National Guard said in an interview that he was “waiting for the scales to tip” with regards to the “riot purgatory” that existed; the National Guard had, as of June 2, been unable to gain control of the city.5 Trump was even rushed to his White House bunker in response to protests in Washington D.C.; the last time those bunkers were used was during the September 11 attacks.6 Transit workers used their collective power to refuse to transport arrested protestors.7 Inspired by the protests, longshore workers of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union struck and shut down ports across the West Coast in mid-June.8 And in terms of putting numbers to the crisis of legitimacy faced by the American state, on June 3 a Monmouth University survey reported that 54% of Americans thought that the burning of the precinct was justified, higher than the level of support enjoyed by either Biden or Trump.9
Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency
The United States military, in Joint Publication 3-24: Counterinsurgency, defines an insurgency as: “The organized use of subversion and violence to seize, nullify, or challenge political control of a region.” Counter-insurgency then is defined as “Comprehensive civilian and military efforts designed to simultaneously defeat and contain insurgency and address its root causes.”10
It is worth quoting from the manual at length to demonstrate the sophistication with which the U.S. Military approaches counter-insurgency operations.
Highlighting the specificity of counter-insurgency operations, the manual argues that:
COIN [counter-insurgency] is distinguished from traditional warfare due to the focus of its operations—a relevant population—and its strategic purpose—to gain or maintain control or influence over—and the support of that relevant population through political, psychological, and economic methods.11
Central to how the U.S. Military sees insurgency is the question of political legitimacy:
The struggle for legitimacy with the relevant population is typically a central theme of the conflict between the insurgency and the HN [host nation] government. The HN government generally needs some level of legitimacy among the population to retain the confidence of the populace and an acknowledgment of governing power. The insurgency will attack the legitimacy of the HN government while attempting to develop its own legitimacy with the population. COIN should reduce the credibility of the insurgency while strengthening the legitimacy of the HN government.12
And in turn, central to the question of legitimacy is the task of building and controlling narratives:
COIN planners should compose a unifying message (the COIN narrative) that is consistent with the overarching USG narrative, which is coupled to the USG [U.S. government] objective. Narrative is a structure of planned themes from which both messages and actions are developed. Narrative provides a common thread of communicative influence. The objective speaks to desired outcome; narrative communicates the story of the how and why of an operation. Common themes within a COIN narrative may be: reinforcing the credibility and perception of legitimacy of the HN and USG COIN operation, exploiting the negative aspects of the insurgent efforts, and preemptively presenting the expected insurgent argument along with counter-arguments. … The COIN narrative should be the result of meticulous target-audience analysis conducted by cultural and language subject matter experts … The COIN narrative should provide the guidance from which themes, actions, and messages can be planned in support of the COIN objectives.13
Narrative construction and control is reiterated in practical terms later in the Manual:
In COIN, the information flow can be roughly divided into information which the USG requires to guide its political-military approach (i.e., knowledge of local conditions) and information which the USG wishes to disseminate to influence populations. At the same time, counterinsurgents also seek to impede the information flow of insurgent groups—both their intelligence collection and their ability to influence the relevant population. 14
One of the tactics emphasized to impede the ability of insurgents to influence the target population is working with local authorities—especially non-governmental ones like religious leaders, and NGOs- to coopt the message of the insurgency and explicitly to moderate it.15 This latter point is extremely important; while moderate movements may enjoy more popular support, they are also far less successful at winning their demands.16 It is therefore in the interest of those defend the existing order to support the moderate elements of a movement.
All this is to say then that the U.S. Military understands insurgency and counter-insurgency as being not just a military question, but rather a question of politics. To this end, the Manual heavily emphasizes the importance of political action in counter-insurgency operations:
To be effective, officials involved in COIN should address two imperatives—political action and security—with equal urgency, recognizing that insurgency is fundamentally an armed political competition…. COIN functions, therefore, include informational, security, political, economic, and development components, all of which are designed to support the overall objective of establishing and consolidating control by the HN government. … This is the core of COIN, because it provides a framework around which all other programs and activities are organized. As described above, depending on the root causes of the insurgency, the strategy may involve elements of political reform, reconciliation, popular mobilization, and governmental capacity building.17
If we understand insurgency and counter-insurgency as involving both a military and political aspect, in which the political is primary, with insurgency being primarily about building a counter-legitimacy to the state and counter-insurgency being primarily about the political isolation of insurgents through the creation of narratives, we can begin to see how such an understanding is useful to apply to American domestic politics. The George Floyd Uprising saw insurgents directly undermine the legitimacy of the existing state, especially the police, through both armed and political action. In turn, the state and establishment responded with both armed and political actions, the latter in the form of co-optation and narrative control.
But the connections between American counter-insurgency and domestic politics are not just on the discursive level. In “The other side of the COIN: counterinsurgency and community policing”, Kristian Williams provides an excellent overview of the material relationship between American military counter-insurgency programs and American policing. This is specifically evident with regard to trends towards the militarization of the police and so-called “Community Policing” initiatives. Williams demonstrates how, in a modern example of the “imperial boomerang”18, many of the methods employed by modern police forces were developed and refined by the American military, including during its occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. In turn, the military partnered with police forces to learn how to better control conquered populations, be they black people living in American cities or Iraqis living under American occupation in Iraq.19
Of particular interest is the role that NGOs play in this process. As was noted earlier, the U.S. Military makes special mention of NGOs in the process of counter-insurgency. An earlier version of the Manual, published in 2006 and authored by David Petraeus, is more explicit, remarking that “some of the best weapons for counterinsurgents do not shoot” and referring to NGOs as “force-multipliers”. Williams is able to show how NGOs were directly involved in de-escalating responses of the community to murders committed by American police in Oakland, as well as involved in anti-gang activities in Boston. Both of these separate efforts fall under the playbook of counter-insurgency.20
Before going in depth into the George Floyd Uprising, it is worthwhile looking at the “why” of counter-insurgency. Why is it that the police and military have developed a comprehensive strategy intended to undermine threats to the existing order? Fundamentally, the modern state exists to protect the interests of the capitalist class—namely the continuation of capital accumulation and exploitation—against the interests of everyone else. In turn, specific states exist to protect the specific interests of their specific capitalist classes. Thus anything that attempts to undermine capitalism, or the ability of capitalists to exploit, must be itself undermined. The state has a myriad of tools at its disposal to help with this process. Some are ideological (they convince people exploitation is in their own interest) whereas others, like the police, are repressive. Insofar as the goal of counter-insurgency is ultimately to protect the accumulation of capital, we should understand counter-insurgency as extending beyond just the actions of the repressive apparatuses of the state. What I will explore below is that in this case, counter-insurgency was a joint effort of the entire American ruling class, both inside and outside the state, to defang the George Floyd Uprising. The American ruling class used both violent and non-violent means to defang the uprising: they deployed what could be called a carrot-and-stick approach in order to protect the social order.
The Carrot…
The Media Narrative
In the days following the murder of George Floyd, the media worked tirelessly to defang the George Floyd Uprising. They did this not by creating reality through discourse, but by selectively and pointedly reporting on certain aspects of reality. As a result, they encouraged people to think about the uprising in specific ways, and in turned called them into action in specific ways. I will focus primarily on the Minneapolis Star Tribune; the narrative trends developed there were later repeated in media across the United States.
Initial media reaction to the uprising directly condemned property destruction. After a Target was looted on the night of May 27, the Star Tribune spent the following day reporting on the impact that riots would have on small businesses.21 True to form, the Star Tribune printed a call for peace from the family and partner of George Floyd22 as well as from “political, faith, community leaders” calling for an “end to riots.”23 The latter story was particularly interesting insofar as the group was called together for a conference by Minnesota governor Tim Walz, and included both church leaders and NGO managers. Here is an example of a top state official picking and choosing who counts as a “community leader” without direct input from the community. In turn, the Star Tribune reported on the meeting treating these externally hand-picked “community leaders” as though their legitimacy derived from the community itself.
In the following days, the Star Tribune shifted focus to the human cost of the riots to the local community. The publication blamed the riots for creating a food desert due to the closing of large corporate grocery stores.24 Rioters were also blamed for the lack of access to medicine now faced by the local community due to the closure of pharmacies.25 Rioters were alleged to have burned down nearly 200 units of affordable housing, thus exacerbating the housing crisis.26 The riots were also allegedly responsible for devastating Minneapolis’ famed Lake Street, home to immigrant-owned business and a hub, according to the Star Tribune, of multi-culturalism.27
In its discussion of the immediate impact of the uprising on the local community, not once did the Star Tribune go beyond surface-level condemnations of the rioters. Suddenly concerned with access to food and medication, the stories did not include discussions as to why the closure of a few grocery stores could create a food desert. There was no discussion on the increased price of food and wealth-disparity. There was no discussion on the monopolization of food sources by large chains. There was no discussion on the effects of for-profit healthcare on access to medicine. No discussions on gentrification and stagnant wages leading to the necessity of specifically designated “affordable” housing. No discussions on the context of the riots: namely 40 million unemployed Americans staring down a pandemic with miniscule government relief. No discussion of looting as a means of getting necessities such as medicine, food, and clothing; no discussion as to why Target and pharmacies became targets. Instead the riots were presented largely without context, as simply an irrational outburst of anger, alone causing problems to the community. Those fighting back against the existing order were blamed for the worst effects of the very order they fought against.
In addition to direct condemnation, the Star Tribune also took a more nuanced approach to the riots. Instead of the riots being an organic expression of community anger, they were presented—both by the media, and the government—as being the work of (usually white) “outside agitators”. Rioting was purported to be the work of secret white-supremacists that had infiltrated the protests in order to cause mayhem. In that same meeting of community leaders called together by Tim Walz on May 30, the executive director of the Council for Minnesotans of African Heritage put it succinctly: “White people from other communities are coming into my community, our communities as some kind of perverse poetry, as if it wasn’t bad enough already. … Go home now. The fascists on the plan right now, turn around.”28 The Star Tribune reported on an Illinois man who had been arrested with explosives in Minneapolis, who had specifically traveled there to riot.29 The mayor of St Paul and the governor of Minnesota had each tweeted that the vast majority -80% to all- of the arrestees in the week preceding June 6 had been from out-of-state despite the fact that there was no evidence to back up such claims. The claims were so ludicrous that the Star Tribune ran a story walking back many of the claims about outside agitators; well after the damage had been done to the protests.30
The goal of these various media narratives—first, condemning the riots; second, emphasizing the damage to the community; and third, blaming outside agitators- was to drive a dual process of bifurcation within the protest movement. The goal of the ruling class was on the one hand to separate “peaceful” liberal protestors from the more radical element, both to avoid radicalization of the moderate protestors but also to isolate the radicals within the movement. Second, the goal was to lump the radical protestors together with apolitical opportunist looters, whether or not the latter group actually existed, and in turn ignore the radical critiques of both policing and society as a whole that the radicals put forward. Thus the establishment attempted to call into being two groups: a group of good, peaceful, moderate protestors; and a second group of opportunist, violent protestors who did not care about the injustice the protests were about. The tactics and message of the first group was to be lauded, whereas the tactics and message of the second group was to be condemned.
Meanwhile, seemingly out of nowhere, another narrative appeared in the media. Across both social and traditional media outlets, stories appeared showing police supporting the protests. Most famous were the images of police (and sometimes National Guard) kneeling with the protestors. Often times this was displayed as the result of a request from the “good protestors”, who were then portrayed as applauding police initiative. However, in this case reality cut through the media spin: the American police were simply too vicious for their “spontaneous” (more on this below) outpouring of empathy to be taken seriously. There were abundant accounts of the same police transitioning from kneeling to attacking protestors within the space of hours.
As the protests spread in the early weeks of June, it was no longer possible for the media to rely on the “outside agitator” platitude. Indeed, with protests in literally every major city in the United States, there was no “outside” for the agitators to come from. And with the utter inhumanity of the police on full display, stories of police taking a knee simply didn’t hold water. The media then turned to focusing almost exclusively on the efforts of liberal NGOs engaged in “rebuilding” efforts31, and the activities of the “good” protestors. The degree to which the “good” protestors were signal-boosted by the media is evident in the speed at which the “Defund the Police” slogan, itself a moderated version of the already moderate “abolish the police” demand, became the public rallying cry of the movement as a whole.32 Finally, towards mid-June, with the protests now largely contained and the radical element isolated, the media began largely ignoring the massive protests that are still occurring, instead only providing local coverage of incidental events.
While I have focused largely on the narrative created in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the same pattern (from demonization, to outside agitators, to focusing on the community cost, the good/bad protestor division, the police sympathy, to NGOs and liberals, to ultimately ignoring the movement) was a pattern that was repeated more-or-less within all major media sources in North America. Why was this the case? The similarity in editorial line between media companies does not indicate direct coordination between media onwers nor does it point to state intervention or censorship. Rather, insofar as media in North America is either owned by large corporations or run by the state, the commonality of interests that exists between rich owners and rich state managers is inevitably reflected in the editorial line of the media which they run.33 It makes total sense then that the media would relay a narrative which had as its effect the defanging of the George Floyd Uprising; such an action was absolutely within the interests of the large capitalists which control the media. The capitalist class, by owning the media and therefore controlling its content, was able to utilize media narratives as part of the counter-insurgency effort against the George Floyd Uprising.
In the case of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the connection between ownership and editorial line could not be clearer. Glen Taylor, the billionaire former state senator, admitted as much when he bought the newspaper in 2014. In an interview with MinnPost, he stated that his ownership of the paper would result in the editorial line being less liberal.34 It is unsurprising then that the overall editorial position of the paper reflects Taylor’s public position, namely that the problem is not specifically law enforcement and that protests are only legitimate if they are peaceful.35 Insofar as the George Floyd Uprising threatened the existing order in Minneapolis, an order that Glen Taylor benefitted from, the Star Tribune would come out against the uprising. This same process played out across the United States over the course of the uprising.
The Copaganda Machine
No account of how the media treated the George Floyd Uprising would be complete without a discussion of something that is often overlooked in accounts of reactionary media spin: the absolutely massive public relations machine employed by the police themselves. While it is possible that the speed with which stories of police “taking a knee” with protestors went viral was entirely natural, it is far more likely that in the wake of the largest anti-police protests in a generation that the police PR machine jumped into overdrive.
The goal of police public relations (PR) is, like any public relations campaign, to influence how the public views the police. In one article written for Police One, the largest English-language online community of police boasting literally tens of thousands of members, the point of police PR is described as “to establish a positive relationship with the community before an incident occurs.” The point of PR is directly contextualized to counteract the public’s reactions to racist police terror: “Events dating back to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, Rodney King, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray and others have been covered extensively in the media and have tarnished the reputation of many agencies. The public relations team must establish or repair the image of the agency within the community.”36 In another article on the same website, another officer describes the utility of “branding” (using a PR campaign to build a police “brand”) insofar as it allows police departments to control messaging and make clear a department’s “value proposition.”37 The goal of branding is to build preconceptions about the role of police, thus filtering any observations through the preconceived image of how police should act. This allows the police to have greater impunity in their actions, as anything they do is seen immediately through the lens of police being good and necessary protectors.
On the surface this seems fairly obvious and innocuous. All firms employ PR strategies in one form or another, in which the firm seeks to use the media to influence public reaction to the firm. However if we consider the social role of police, namely a repressive apparatus of the capitalist state designed to protect the conditions which allow for exploitation, the police use of PR becomes more sinister. Police directly attempt to manipulate public perceptions of their actions in their favour, including racist murder.
How widespread is the police use of PR? It is difficult to say. An examination of several police budgets over the past years of cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Toronto turned up little information; the police are remarkably good at concealing precisely what they spend their money on. There is some scattered information though that suggests that the police spend a staggering amount on PR. For instance, in 2016 the Denver Police Department was revealed to have spent $1.3 million over three years on its “media relations unit”.38 The Metropolitan Police in the UK had, in 2015, a 10 million pound annual PR budget that employed 100 communications staff, with a police across the UK spending 36 million pounds annually on PR.39 The LAPD, rather than just employing a Public Information Officer (PIO), has an entire Public Relations Unit.40 In Toronto, the 2019 police budget requested an additional $7.9 million to be partially used on nine new positions in the Corporate Communications Unit, increasing the total staff from 16 to 25, to be used to “help increase capabilities in public relations, internal communication and digital strategy.”41 And in 2020, the NYPD allotted $3.2 million for public relations, in order to tell their “side of the story.”42
Direct police department expenses on PR are just one of the PR avenues available to police. Police unions also hire PR firms to improve the image of their officers or to advance specific goals.43 Individual police officers can also hire PR firms to represent them in times of need. One such service, Cop PRotect, allows officers to pay $50 per month for guaranteed representation if something should go wrong. In a story placed in Police Magazine, the need for such a service is related directly to the Ferguson Uprising:
Cops today are completely at the mercy of activists who don’t care about the truth … Darren Wilson was nearly murdered and now lives in hiding, while the man who tried to kill him is declared a hero by activists. Cop PRotect gives cops like Darren Wilson a trusted friend to tell their stories in ways agency information officers, union representatives and the media cannot or will not.44
In this case, the firm was created directly to mitigate community blowback against individual officers in the wake of racist police terror.
While the amount that is spent on pro-police PR is hard to find, the indirect effects make it more obvious. Indeed, there exists an entire parasitic cottage industry of pro-police PR firms and consulting services, which exist solely to increase public perceptions in the police. For instance, a quick search turned up John Guilfoil Public Relations which specializes in the public sector, including the police. A testimonial from the chief of the Massachusetts Police Department states that the firm “provides an extremely valuable service to those agencies that want to be proactive in … getting out a positive message to the community.”45 PolicePR in Indiana offers a Public Information Officer boot camp, in partnership with the Greenwood Police Department.46 Melissa Agnes, a crisis management strategist who has been featured on Police One, has a whole series of articles and talks dealing specifically with police misconduct, ranging from “Discussing the Divide Between Police and Their Communities” to “Discussing The #Ferguson Crisis with Tim Burrows”.47 None of these firms or services would exist if the police were not paying for them.
Police PR strategies are not limited to traditional media. To give the strategies a more organic feel, police forces and their hired PR firms make frequent use of social media in order to help control the narrative around their actions. Police Chief Magazine warns officers that “Hiding and Hoping is Not a PR Strategy”; police forces not only need to monitor social media to see what perception of the police force is after an incident, but must also build “a social media presence”. This latter point can include spreading information about a suspect in the event that video showing police misconduct spreads.48 As part of the U.S. Department of Justice’s ‘Community Oriented Policing Services’ (COPS) Strategic Communication Practices guide, there is an entire section on the importance of social media.49 Another article on Police One suggests that police departments send officers onto Reddit, both to get ahead of a story, but also to intervene in the discussions as police.50 These efforts can be bolstered by using “community outreach programs” to “build an online army of supporters.”51
Lest anyone think that the police simply use social media to inform their audience about their activities, the police consciously use social media to manipulate public opinion during moments of crisis. Taken from another Police One article (a fantastic resource for those wanting to understand the mindset of police), this one published ominously on May 28, 2020, titled “12 things every police department’s civil unrest plan needs”, there is an entire section on social media. Departments are instructed to be aware that protestors can use social media to amplify and coordinate their activity; departments should also be aware and be ready to counter those that would “lower the perception of [their] department.” If that fails, there’s always the National Guard.52 Force Science News published an article/advertisement featuring Melissa Agnes in 2018, which advised departments to have prepared a ‘Communications Bible’ to help navigate crises such as “officer-involved shootings”.53 In a mid-June Police One leadership briefing, after weeks of anti-police protests, authors mockingly reflected: “Now do you recognize the power of social media?” arguing that police “must start viewing… social media as an integral tool in policing.”54
All this is to say there exists a massive and highly coordinated police PR machine, which the police use to try and directly control media narratives in their favour. They do this as part of a broader effort to maintain the current social order. While it is impossible to prove this soon, I strongly suspect that it was this machine which was responsible for the flood of sympathetic stories about the police that featured prominently across traditional and social media in early June. Despite the best efforts of the police, their unions, and their employed PR firms, they were unable to shift the broader media narrative for more than a few days; the brutal actions of police across the United States spoke for themselves and undermined attempts to portray the police in a positive light.
While ultimately unsuccessful, the wave of pro-police media in early June gave credibility to the more moderate argument that the institution of policing itself is not the problem, but rather that it is only some “bad apples” amidst an otherwise salvageable police force. This in turn gave more ideological power to moderate and liberal elements, the so-called “good protestors”, within the broader protest movement. To tie this back into counter-insurgency, control over information in the form of both narrative construction and information dissemination is one of the main tools of counter-insurgency strategies. The police consciously did just this, and in the process strengthened the moderates within the movement.
The Non-Profit Industrial Complex
As noted earlier, the U.S. military considers NGO partnerships to be a vital part of counter-insurgency efforts. Much has been written about the negative effects of non-profits on social movements. In the classic collection of essays titled The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, Andrea Smith argues that capital and the capitalist state use nonprofits to: monitor and control social movements, divert public resources into private hands, manage and control dissent, redirect activist efforts towards careerism and away from mass-based modes of organizing, allow corporations to mask exploitation through philanthropy, and encourage social movements to model themselves in terms of structure and politics after capitalist models.55 For the purposes of this essay, I want to focus on two areas: first, how NGOs have a moderating effect on the politics of a movement. Second, I will talk about how NGOs frequently work with the police to protect the current social order under the guise of changing it.
How is it that non-profits are able to moderate social movements? The capitalist class is well aware of their own interests and spends an inordinate amount of money defending them. In the process, they create philanthropic foundations. These philanthropic foundations not only allow capitalists to transfer wealth inter-generationally without taxation (giving their children positions in the foundations) but also fund charitable activities, such as non-profits. There is a catch though: the capitalists will not fund anything that does not fit their interests, namely the continuation of exploitation. They are happy, for instance, to fund affordable housing initiatives insofar as those initiatives do not tackle the root causes of homelessness, namely private property. Capitalist foundations therefore provide resources to NGOs which act in line with their interests. In turn, NGOs knowingly moderate themselves in order to better secure resources. Furthermore respectable NGOs can become the public face of a movement, effectively forcing the more radical organizations out of the public eye.
The Civil Rights and anti-police movements are full of examples of the moderating effects of NGOs. For instance, in the 1960s white philanthropist Stephen Currier set up the Council for United Civil Rights Leadership in order to channel foundation funding to Civil Rights groups. The so-called ‘Big Six’ were brought together; of the six, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the most radical of the groups, received the least amount of funding. More radical groups, such as the Nation of Islam, were completely excluded. In 1963 Malcolm X specifically criticized the Big Six and the Council for United Civil Rights Leadership in his famous ‘Message to the Grass Roots’ speech in which he reflected on the March on Washington which had taken place earlier that year.56 The goal of these maneuvers by white philanthropists was clear: fund the more moderate element of the Civil Rights movement to avoid the movement taking a radical turn and undermining the ability for American capitalism to operate.57
Fast forward 50 years, and the same pattern reoccurs. In Oakland in 2009, non-profits directly intervened to deradicalize the response to the killing of Oscar Grant. Ahead of a major rally in January 2009, the Oakland police arranged meetings with various nonprofit and church leaders in order to defang the protests before they even began.58 Religious leaders asked their congregations to not attend the protests. A coalition of NGOs came together and formed the Coalition Against Police Execution (CAPE). CAPE explicitly called for a lack of militancy in their protests, and stood as a physical barrier between police and protestors. 59 In turn, CAPE became the public, legitimate face of the protests, which was reinforced through media coverage.
The uprising in 2014 in Ferguson saw a similar process play itself out. There the NGO influence was given an organizational existence in the form of Black Lives Matter. I want to be clear here; when speaking of Black Lives Matter I am talking about the official organization and not the broader movement of the same name. Black Lives Matter, while first conceived of in 2013, organized its first major action in 2014 with the Black Lives Matter Freedom Ride in response to the killing of Michael Brown by the Ferguson police. Black Lives Matter became the public face of the movement. Despite the Ferguson uprising originating in riots, Black Lives Matter and other organizations planned a series of actions over the course of the summer of 2014 that channeled local activism into safer and less rebellious avenues.
Following the Ferguson uprising, moderate elements of the Black Lives Matter movement became a relatively safe outlet for liberals to support and into which the capitalist class could channel outrage. Black Lives Matter and the constellation of new organizations and networks around it received an absolutely immense amount of donations from larger donors like The Ford Foundation and George Soros.60 The more liberal elements of the movement, able to secure donations, were able to take centre-stage. For instance, one recipient, the Organization for Black Struggle, used some of its funding to create the Hands Up Coalition. This coalition popularized the “hands up, don’t shoot” slogan used by protestors; this ran against slogans by more militant black power activists such as “arms up, shoot back” and “fists up, fight back”. More radical yet equally active groups, such as the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, received no funding. In 2016, Black Lives Matter and 27 other organizations, as part of the Movement for Black Lives, issued a platform of demands titled A Vision for Black Lives. Rather than a comprehensive plan and program to mobilize the masses to fight for their own liberation, the document is a set of policy guidelines. The effect is that efforts are taken off the streets and channeled into traditional power structures where they are ultimately destined to fail.
The founders of Black Lives Matter were first introduced to each other through an NGO known as Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity (BOLD). The board of directors of BOLD, those who decide its political direction, is made up of managers of other NGOS.61 BOLD also receives an immense sum of money from private donors, such as through the “philanthropic intermediary” known as Borealis Philanthropy62 and through Funders for Justice.63 This latter group, also created in response to the Ferguson Uprising, in turn receives funding from The Ford Foundation and the Open Society Foundations; hardly groups interested in a radical transformation of the social order or the end of exploitation. I don’t bring this up to allege a conspiracy that Black Lives Matter is being secretly run by The Ford Foundation, but rather to show that even Black Lives Matter has its origins within the non-profit industrial complex milieu, which in turn effects its politics. Turning back to the George Floyd Uprising, it is unsurprising that in a recent Reddit Ask-Me-Anything, Kailee Scales, the Managing Director for Black Lives Matter, condemned the riots and announced efforts to channel the George Floyd Uprising into voter registration and “civic engagement” through the #WhatMatters2020 campaign.64
The ways in which non-profits have attempted to moderate explosions of rage during the George Floyd Uprising are too many to list. One example I want to focus on, however, is particularly telling. On May 30, two days after the burning of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis, a local non-profit called Pillsbury United Communities had a press conference. Pillsbury United Communities is an incredibly well established NGO; founded in 1879, it runs a number of outreach and education programs, community programs (such as free COVID-19 testing), as well as “social enterprises” including a grocery store. The press conference on May 30 brought together Jamie Foxx, Stephen Jackson, BLM activist Tamika Mallory, alongside George Floyd’s family. Speakers were explicit in their calls for peaceful protests, but generally did not condemn the riots. A peaceful rally followed.65 Thus at the height of the militant protests, people were asked by “legitimate” community leaders to temper their anger and engage in traditionally and easily ignored protests. These calls were amplified by liberals outside the community and the media.
A few days after the rally, Pillsbury United Communities used George Floyd’s death to issue a fundraising call; it is unclear from their website how the money will be used to ensure “Justice for George Floyd”.66 But individual donations are not the only way that Pillsbury United Communities raises funds. It also receives donations from massive foundations such as the Greater Twin Cities United Way, the Minneapolis Foundation, and the St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation. The United Way, for instance, acts as a “philanthropic intermediary”, collection donations from large corporations, and then granting money to non-profits. In this specific case, the money given to Pillsbury United Communities comes from sources such as 3M, U.S. Bank, Cargill, and Target.67 The latter, notably, also provides hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to police foundations.68 One can see the issue of an organization fighting for justice against the police having similar funding sources to the police themselves. It is also unlikely that the capitalist class would fund those capable of truly undermining it.
That an NGO intervened in a mass struggle to both channel the movement in a more liberal direction while monopolizing resources is not particularly surprising. What is particularly interesting though is Pillsbury United Communities’ connection to community policing. A 2006 report by the Minneapolis Department of Health & Family Support lists Waite House, a Pillsbury United Communities site, as a “Weed & Seed Safe Haven”.69 Weed and Seed programs, for context, gained prominence in 1992 after the Rodney King riots as a way to connect police and community leaders in order to ostensibly combat gang violence70; they made cohesive the militarization tactics (weed) and community policing tactics (seed) employed in counter-insurgency efforts.71 In December 2014, the FBI gave Pillsbury United Communities its “Director’s Community Leadership Award”, an annual award given to groups for crime prevention efforts.72 Then-president and chief executive, Chanda Smith Baker, accepted the award. Coincidentally, Chanda Smith Baker—now working for the Minneapolis Foundation—also sits on the Minnesota Department of Public Safety’s newspeak titled “Working Group on Police-Involved Deadly Force Encounters”. The goal of the working group was to “identify ways to reduce deadly force encounters with law enforcement”73. Members of the group included the Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo, the Minnesota Attorney General, Philando Castile’s (killed by police in Minnesota in 2016) uncle, and other judge’s, academics, politicians, and NGO managers. Tragically and ironically, the working group released its findings in February 2020; that George Floyd was murdered, just a few months later in a “police-involved deadly force encounter”, demonstrates the extent to which so-called community policing is useful to the community.
One final interesting link between NGOs and the police in Minneapolis: as mentioned earlier, Chanda Smith Baker, after working for Pillsbury United Communities, went on to work as the Senior Vice President, Impact for The Minneapolis Foundation. The current president and CEO of the Minneapolis Foundation is R.T. Rybak, who was also the former mayor of Minneapolis. R.T. Rybak also sits on the board of a company called Benchmark Analytics: an IT company which has designed a system capable of predicting when officers will become problematically violent. Rybak therefore has a direct material interest in “reforming” the police. In an article written on June 2, titled “I Was the Mayor of Minneapolis and I Know Our Cops Have a Problem”, Rybak recalls surveying the damage to Minneapolis after the riots with Chanda Smith Baker, before advertising his firm’s solution to police violence.74 Unsurprisingly he emphasizes the humanity of the police, and he sees the solution as being community policing informed by predicative behavior technology.
The organizational and interpersonal links between NGO managers, politicians, police leadership, “community leaders”, and the board members of large capitalist firms points to the existence of a ruling capitalist class. The above is just a small illustration of how the ruling class rules in Minneapolis.
To summarize all of this: Pillsbury United Communities is an established, well-respected local NGO. It is part of the non-profit industrial complex, relying on philanthropic intermediaries for much of its funding, which in turn are funded by massive corporations. It came out very vocally in the early stages of the George Floyd Uprising, urging a more liberal and institutional approach to activism as opposed to the riots. And, it has close ties to the Minneapolis Police Department and state police through community policing programs. It is just one textbook example of many of how NGOs act as elements of a counter-insurgency strategy.
The Democrats
The Democrats have been referred to as the “graveyard of social movements” insofar as they absorb, coopt, and disorganize them.75 Their approach to the George Floyd Uprising is no different. What the Democratic Party sought to do in the wake of the George Floyd Uprising was a combination of repression (in those places in which it exercised power, such as Minneapolis, New York, L.A., etc.) and coopt its energies into the Biden 2020 campaign. Given the unpopularity of Biden and the overall increasing disinterest in electoral politics by much of the left the attempt to coopt the movement, at least ostensibly, has been unsuccessful. It is, however, still worth examining in order to paint a full picture of the counter-insurgency campaign against the uprising.
At the beginning of the uprising, the Democratic Party machine jumped into motion but was unsure how to act. While top Democrat strategists spoke to media about how the uprising could affect the election76 (indicating that they were in fact working on a response), there was little in the way of official high-level statement or actions for almost a week. Then on June 2 two fairly major events occurred. First, Biden publicly brought Julian Castro into his campaign; Castro had been a vocal proponent of liberal police reforms during his bid to become the Democratic nominee for president.77 Second, Pelosi, the multi-millionaire Speaker of the House, asked the Congressional Black Caucus to draft a series of police reforms.78
On June 8, following a ridiculous display in which Pelosi and other top Democrats took a knee wearing Ghanaian kente cloths, the Justice in Policing Act was revealed. The act is fairly milquetoast—far behind the nebulous demands of the uprising—and includes provisions for more easily prosecuting police in cases of brutality, mandatory body cameras, as well as a ban on chokeholds. The Act does absolutely nothing to abolish or even defund police departments. 79 Nor is the act likely to become law; even if the act was to pass the Republican-majority Senate, Trump has announced his attention to veto it.80
Rather than an accident, the unlikelihood of the bill passing is a feature, one of the ways in which so-called “checks and balances” help protect the current order. The Democrats know this; had it been likely to pass the bill would have been even more muted. The inaction of the Democrats in the face of the George Floyd Uprising is not surprising; they are one of the two parties that have overseen the construction and maintenance of the white-supremacist order in the United States. Biden is himself a career segregationist and author of a 1994 crime bill81 which was a cornerstone in the construction of the modern for-profit prison behemoth.82 The Congressional Black Caucus has itself helped to make the police a “protected class”, and also contributed to the militarization of police through the 1033 program.83
Despite the lack of success of the official Democrat cooptation attempt of the George Floyd Uprising, I want to point out one of the more insidious ways that the Democrats are attempting to coopt outrage against police murders through social movements themselves. It is worth first pointing out that Alicia Garza, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, is a supporter of the centrist-wing of the Democrats, specifically Elizabeth Warren.84 Black Lives Matter has recently launched a campaign called #WhatMatters2020. The goal of the campaign is to bring “BLM supporters and allies to the polls in the 2020 U.S Presidential Election to build collective power and ensure candidates are held accountable for the issues that systematically and disproportionately impact Black and under-served communities across the nation.”85 A campaign video calls on people to vote for an America where “police are held accountable” and “where we have access to quality healthcare”. The problem with this campaign, of course, is that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are even pretending to deliver on promises like this. Biden does not support medicare for all, and was an architect of the current racist criminal justice system. The #WhatMatters2020 campaign is a cynical sheepdog campaign, bringing black people angry at the current injustices of American white-supremacist capitalism back into the Democrats.
Invasion of the Liberals
Earlier in this article, I mentioned that the media was attempting to call into existence a group of “good”, peaceful protestors. I want to spend more time now talking about this process. Ideology is both produced by practice, but also exists as a way of calling particular types of people into activity.86 When the media began focusing almost exclusively on “good” protestors, it was at first inventing this category out of almost thin air; the line it was drawing was an artificial one. But by putting forward this ideological pole, the media called into action people who had hitherto not been involved. The media, alongside notable liberal politicians and other establishment figures, created a group of liberal protestors out of inactive liberals who now saw themselves and their own political predilections reflected in the ongoing uprising. Included in these efforts by the media and liberal establishment figures is a now-famous essay by former president Barrack Obama, posted to Medium on June 1, in which he said he supported the protests, condemned violence, and urged reform efforts to be focused on institutional channels.87
The flip side of the liberal “call to action” is that it also acts as a safeguard against radicalization. When reality confronts ideology, it is often ideology that is changed. Reality forces a rupture in one’s worldview which can lead to radicalization. In this case it became difficult to substantiate the story of a good, neutral, and protective state in the face of ubiquitous police violence against even peaceful protestors. If reality can be changed or if powerful narratives can reinforce ideology, ideology is cemented rather than discarded. In this case, liberalism as a worldview was able to escape challenge due to the emergence of establishment liberals in support of the protests.
The result of the liberalization of the protests on public opinion is interesting. By mid-June, 67% of Americans reportedly supported the ongoing protests. The racial breakdown was more stark: 60% of white people supported the protests, whereas 86% of black people supported them. Despite this, 59% of Americans (including 62% of white Americans compared with 43% of black Americans) believed that the protests were spurred on at least in part as a means for people to engage in criminal behavior.88 Thus the liberalization of the protests resulted in a situation in which the majority of a country deeply enmeshed in white supremacy supported protests proclaiming the value of black lives, despite the majority of the country materially benefitting from that same unjust racial hierarchy. That major politicians like Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and former Governor of Massachusetts and presidential candidate Mitt Romney joined the protests—both politicians with significant power to change the conditions against which they protested- signals only that the political message of the uprising had shifted in the popular consciousness away from “dismantle white supremacy” to the base level of “black people are human”. That nearly one third of America could not even support such a basic affirmation of humanity is telling.
The liberal invasion had three main effects on the uprising. First, the influx of liberals into the rallies not only led to the proliferation of protests and an increase in attendance, but also to their pacification. Protestors began to self-police, modifying their tactics in line with the interests of the existing order. Protestors made sure to demarcate themselves and their actions as “peaceful”, thus robbing themselves of even the specter of militancy. To a certain extent there is a degree of “selection bias” here; militant protestors are more likely to be arrested, and therefore over time the composition of a protest will naturally become more liberal. Police are aware of this and consciously seek to tie up activist time and resources in legal proceedings.
Internally to the protests, liberal protestors acted like “peace police”, disrupting the activities of militants. Examples included liberals in Washington DC turning over a “rioter” to the police (at an anti-police march!) at the end of May,89 as well as the doxxing by liberal activists of Rayshard Brook’s girlfriend, pegged as an outside agitator.90 She is accused of setting fire to the Wendy’s outside of which her partner was murdered by police. Another high-profile example of the liberalization of the protests on the tactical level is Al Sharpton’s call for a march on Washington in August, which took place at the height of militant protests occurring in Washington D.C..91 Such a call, not to support the existing protests but to postpone them, was a calculated attempt to de-escalate the uprising.
Second, the influx of liberals into the movement has paved the way for false victories. By this I mean superficial gains that ultimately leave the underlying power structure which gave rise to the protests unchallenged. Included here is the “Black Lives Matter” street mural in Washington D.C., various corporate black-washing campaigns, the changing of band names, and the cancelling of shows like COPS. One notes the irony of the mayor of New York ordering that “Black Lives Matter” be painted outside of Trump Towers while overseeing a police department which brutalizes black people and and while also opposing efforts to defund the NYPD.
Third, the influx of liberals into the movement had an effect on defanging the demands of the movement. Black Lives Matter was quick to issue the demand to defund the police in the early days of the George Floyd Uprising: they explicitly pushed for a defunding of the police, without going into detail as to what that would entail.92 Other activists seized on the space this opened up and stated that “defund” meant “defund everything”. They argued that the police were not reformable and therefore had to be abolished.93 What followed was a discussion in the media about whether or not “defund” actually meant “defund”. There was no shortage of liberals assuring other concerned liberals that defunding didn’t actually mean that there would be no police.94 While Minneapolis has since begun steps to disband their police force, demands in other locations seem to ask for a portion of police budgets to be re-allocated to community resources, in line with the Movement for Black Lives policy demands.95
The conceptual slippage of “defund” has not gone unnoticed by the police themselves. In a June 18 article on Police One, Mike Walker, a police officer for 27 years, wrote that “defunding is really just a way of saying reduced funding.”96 In the same article he offers assurance to worried police officers by noting that budget cuts were already on the agenda due to COVID-19, and that most municipalities legally cannot function without police due to their municipal charters.
That at least some police are fine with temporarily defunding the police speaks to the heart of just how defanged a demand “defund the police” actually is. But “abolish the police” as a slogan absent a critique of the conditions that give rise to the police is itself a demand that does not cut to the heart of the matter. The police exist because capitalism requires force to defend inequality and exploitation. Without ending exploitation, there will still need to be some form of coercive apparatus to ensure the continued existence of exploitation. Thus the coercive functions of the police will be offloaded to other state apparatuses; there will still be violent, racist coercion whether or not the police exist. This is something that already happens; consider, for instance, the racist terror that child welfare services across Canada (not armed, not police) put Indigenous people through for years. The George Floyd Uprising opened the space for discussions about the fundamental nature of society, about capitalism, imperialism, and racial inequality in America. Liberals shifted the overton window to exclude visions of radical transformation, instead focusing on the degree to which police should be defunded. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s now viral Instagram post which stated that police abolition looks like white suburbia, an atomized capitalist dystopia, makes total sense in this context.97
The liberal invasion resulted in a defanging of protest tactics, results, and even the demands themselves. This process, which was aided by the police, the media, and “legitimate” community leaders, was nothing less than the political side of a counter-insurgency campaign by the American ruling class directed against the George Floyd Uprising. Thus a movement which began with the burning of a police station has been transformed into one of requesting minor amendments to municipal budgets.
…And the Stick
The majority of the article has focused on the less-obvious methods that the American ruling class has used in its counter-insurgency efforts against the George Floyd Uprising. However, while counter-insurgency is more effective if it involves elements of soft power, no counter-insurgency effort is complete without open repression. The efforts against the George Floyd Uprising are no exception.
It is hard to overstate the scale of the police operation against protestors over the past month. For instance, by June 2 there already been over 11 000 arrests of protestors.98 The volume of arrests was used as an excuse to temporarily suspend habeus corpus in New York.99 There have been numerous documented arrests and attacks on journalists from even liberal platforms such as CNN. To my knowledge there are no up to date figures on the total number of arrests. In terms of the intensity of the police response, over the past month there have been countless scenes of police using tear gas and pepper spray to clear otherwise peaceful protests. An online database has logged over 670 individual incidents of police brutality caught on video.100 Police have killed at least four protestors over the course of the uprising. Many more have been maimed.101 As a result there are at least 40 different lawsuits currently underway against police departments for brutality during the George Floyd Uprising.102
As if the level of direct repression was not enough, there has also been an increase in surveillance of activists. A recent leak, titled “Blue Leaks”, has revealed that the FBI monitored social media extensively during the protests and forward information it thought relevant to local police departments.103 FBI agents have also harassed activists after they attended recent protests against police brutality.104 The goal of FBI harassment in general is to intimidate protestors and organizers into inactivity as a means of disorganizing movements. These most recent incidents are reminiscent of FBI surveillance and intimidation of the anti-war movement and COINTELPRO.
The extraordinary level of police terror was not enough to contain the uprising. The National Guard was deployed to 31 states and Washington D.C.. This involved over 62 000 soldiers.105 The National Guard was itself involved in the violent repression of the protests.106 Over 200 cities imposed a curfew, which affected more than 60 million people.107 Trump went as far as to threaten to use the American military to impose order on cities where the protests could not be contained by conventional repression.108
One final aspect to overt repression of protests which needs to be included is the role of far right organizations and militia groups. While these are ostensibly distinct from the state, there is significant overlap and cooperation between police forces and far right organizations; a now infamous 2006 FBI report details the extent to which white supremacists have infiltrated police departments.109 For instance, in early June police in Oregon were caught on video coordinating with the far-right Proud Boys to help them avoid arrest after they intimidated George Floyd protestors.110 Much has also been written about the so-called Boogaloo Movement, which has targeted anti-police brutality protests.111
There have been many attacks by the far right on recent protests. Incidents include a mob of armed counter-protestors in Bethel, Ohio which attacked a black lives matter rally searching for “antifa”.112 The KKK has also been active in these efforts: they attacked a black lives matter rally in Nevada,113 and a local KKK leader in Virginia drove his car into a protest in mid-June.114 The autonomous zone set up in Seattle has also been a magnet for far-right attacks; on June 15 the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer entered the zone and beat a man,115 and there have been five shootings directed at the zone in recent weeks, somehow allowed by police. The most recent one resulted in the death of two attackers and injuries to a 14 year old boy.116 Far right groups have also announced a plan to “retake” the zone on July 4.117
Police and national guard brutality, police harassment and surveillance, threats of military intervention, and attacks by the far right all serve as the coercive elements to the American establishment’s counter-insurgency efforts against the George Floyd Uprising. Without the threat of violence the “carrot” side of the “carrot and stick” formula would not be as attractive. The end goal however, is the same: the maintenance and defense of an order defined by exploitation and white supremacy.
Conclusion
Over the course of this article what I have sought to do is outline some of the ways that the American ruling sought to defend itself during the course of one of the largest threats to its own existence in recent years. I have shown how combined and coordinated efforts by: police forces, the military, capitalist media, NGOs, the Democrats, far-right groups, and liberal establishment figures have all combined to undermine the George Floyd Uprising. Thus far these efforts seem to have been rather successful.
The beautiful thing about history, however, is that it is never predetermined. The future is not written. While the establishment has a mind-boggling array of resources and sophisticated counter-insurgency techniques at its disposal, it is not infallible. Indeed, it does (and has!) made mistakes. It is these mistakes that provide openings for revolutionary forces to intervene and change the existing social order. Even the outcome of these protests is not yet decided: they continue, and the protestors become increasingly sophisticated in fighting back. The massive uprising of the past few weeks has shown the degree to which the people do possess power. But the events have also shown the pitfalls into which movements of resistance can fall. By writing this article I hope to have exposed some of these pitfalls, so that liberation struggles now and in the future can avoid them.
Notes
- ↩ VOA News, “Minnesota Calls National Guard to Quell Violent Protests in Minneapolis”.
- ↩ Kandist Mallett, “The Black Lives Matter Revolution Can’t Be Co-Opted By Police and Lawmakers”.
- ↩ Kristian Williams, “The other side of the COIN: counterinsurgency and community policing,” Interface, Vol 3, No 1, May 2011.
- ↩ Aaron Morrison and Tim Sullivan, “Minneapolis overwhelmed again by protests over Floyd death,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, May 30, 2020.
- ↩ Reid Forgrave, “On patrol in St. Paul, National Guard waits ‘for the scales to tip’”, Minneapolis Star Tribune, June 2, 2020.
- ↩ Jamie Ehrlich, “The hidden history of the secret presidential bunker,” CNN Politics.
- ↩ Hilary Hanson, “NYC Transit Union Backs Bus Drivers Who Refuse To Transport Protestors For NYPD”. HuffPost U.S., May 30, 2020.
- ↩ Joe DeManuelle-Hall, “West Coast Dockers Stop Work to Honor George Floyd”. Labor Notes, June 11, 2020.
- ↩ Matthew Impelli, “54 Percent of Americans Think Burning Down Minneapolis Police Precinct Was Justified After George Floyd’s Death,” Newsweek, June 6, 2020.
- ↩ Joint Publication 3-24: Counterinsurgency, GL-5.
- ↩ Joint Publication 3-24: Counterinsurgency, xiii.
- ↩ Joint Publication 3-24: Counterinsurgency, I-7.
- ↩ Joint Publication 3-24: Counterinsurgency, I-8.
- ↩ Joint Publication 3-24: Counterinsurgency, III-6.
- ↩ Joint Publication 3-24: Counterinsurgency, III-14.
- ↩ Feinberg, M., Willer, R., & Kovacheff, C. (2020). “The activist’s dilemma: Extreme protest actions reduce popular support for social movements”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Advance online publication.
- ↩ Joint Publication 3-24: Counterinsurgency, III-5.
- ↩ Connor Woodman, “The Imperial Boomerang: How colonial methods of repression migrate back to the metropolis”.
- ↩ Kristian Williams, “The other side of the COIN: counterinsurgency and community policing,” Interface, Vol 3, No 1, May 2011.
- ↩ Williams, “The other side of the COIN: counterinsurgency and community policing”.
- ↩ Kavita Kumar and Miguel Otarola, “Small-business owners pick up the pieces after night of rage, destruction”, Minneapolis Star Tribune, May 28, 2020.
- ↩ Paul Walsh, “Seeing his city on fire would ‘devastate’ George Floyd, girlfriend says”, Minneapolis Star Tribune, May 28, 2020.
- ↩ Briana Bierschbach, “Minnesota’s political, faith, community leaders plead for an end to riots”, Minneapolis Star Tribune, May 30, 2020.
- ↩ John Ewoldt, “Minneapolis neighborhoods face food desert after looting closes multiple stores”, Minneapolis Star Tribune, June 2, 2020.
- ↩ Kavita Kumar and Adam Belz, “In riot-hit Twin Cities neighborhoods, a hole where pharmacies used to be”, Minneapolis Star Tribune, June 2, 2020.
- ↩ Jim Buchta, “Minneapolis vandalism targets include 189-unit affordable housing development.” Minneapolis Star Tribune, May 28, 2020.
- ↩ Kathleen Hennessy and Tim Sullivan, “Unrest devastates a city’s landmark street of diversity.” Minneapolis Star Tribune. May 31, 2020.
- ↩ Briana Bierschbach, “Minnesota’s political, faith, community leaders plead for an end to riots”, Minneapolis Star Tribune, May 30, 2020.
- ↩ Andy Mannix, “’We came to riot’: Illinois man livestreamed lighting fires, handing out explosives in Minneapolis, charges say”. Minneapolis Star Tribune, June 1, 2020.
- ↩ Torey Van Oot. “’Fog of conflict’: Minnesota officials responding to George Floyd protests, violence helped spread of misinformation”. Minneapolis Star Tribune, June 6, 2020.
- ↩ Kelly Smith, “Minneapolis, St. Paul foundations aim at rebuilding, criminal justice reform after riots.”. Minneapolis Star Tribune, June 5, 2020; “How To Give Back To Your Besieged Community”. CBS Minnesota, June 9, 2020.
- ↩ Sam Levin. “Movement to defund police gains ‘unprecedented’ support across U.S..” The Guardian, June 4, 2020; Jack Kelly. “The Movement To Defund Or Disband Police: Here’s What You Need To Know Now.” Forbes, June 9, 2020.
- ↩ Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent. Michael Parenti, Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media.
- ↩ Britt Robson, “New owner Glen Taylor: less liberal Star Tribune ahead.” MinnPost, April 16, 2014.
- ↩ Chris Haynes. “Timberwolves owner Glen Taylor calls George Floyd’s death ‘a shame’ and ‘a tragedy’”. Yahoo Sports, May 28, 2020.
- ↩ Dan Grossi, “Public relations in law enforcement: Is the PIO obsolete?” Police One, January 8, 2020.
- ↩ W. Michael Phibbs, “Why your police department needs a brand.” Police One, September 7, 2017.
- ↩ John Ferrugia, Brittany Freeman, Jason Foster. “Denver police defend public relations spending”. The Denver Channel, February 17, 2016.
- ↩ William Turvill. “UK police forces spend more than £36m a year on PR and communications”. Press Gazette, May 1, 2015.
- ↩ Los Angeles Police Department. “Public Relations Unit”, Official Site of The Los Angeles Police Department.
- ↩ Mark Saunders, Chief of Police. “Toronto Police Service—2019 Operating Budget Request”.
- ↩ Jake Offenhartz, “NYPD Defends Its Massive Budget As Social Services And Youth Programs Are Cut”. The Gothamist, May 15, 2020.
- ↩ Joel Rub, David Zahniser. “L.A. police union hires PR firm in bid to win pay raises”. Los Angeles Times, January 10, 2015.
- ↩ POL Staff. “PR Firm Launches Service to Defend Police Officers from Anti-Cop Activists.” Police Magazine, November 17, 2015.
- ↩ John Guilfoil Public Relations. “Sectors We Serve”.
- ↩ PolicePR.
- ↩ Melissa Agnes. “Discussing the Divide Between Police and Their Communities, on The Police Podcast”. Melissa Agnes: Crisis Management Strategist. January 27, 2015; Melissa Agnes. “TCIP #011—Discussing The #Ferguson Crisis with Tim Burrows”. Melissa Agnes: Crisis Management Strategist. August 17, 2014.
- ↩ Julie Parker. “Hiding and Hoping Is Not a PR Strategy.” Police Chief Magazine.
- ↩ Darrel W. Stephens, Julia Hill, Sheldon Greenburg. Strategic Communication Practices: A Toolkit for Police Executives.
- ↩ Sean Whitcomb, Jonah Spangenthal-Lee. “3 reasons your agency should be on Reddit.” Police One, May 2, 2019.
- ↩ P1 Staff. “Roundtable: How to match your agency’s social media strategy with community needs”. Police One, May 2, 2019.
- ↩ Heather R. Cotter. “12 things every police department’s civil unrest plan needs”. Police One, May 28, 2020.
- ↩ “Are you ready for the crisis that may be heading your way?” Police One, July 5, 2018.
- ↩ Yael Bar-tur, Mathew Rejis, “Now do you recognize the power of social media?”. Police One, June 12, 2020.
- ↩ Andrea Smith, “Introduction”, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, 3.
- ↩ Malcolm X, “Message to the Grass Roots”. Black Past.
- ↩ Netfa Freeman, “Movement Ferguson, Beware the Nonprofit Industrial Complex”. Black Agenda Report, January 21, 2015.
- ↩ George Ciccariello-Maher, “Chronicle of a Riot Foretold”. Counterpunch, June 29, 2010.
- ↩ Advance the Struggle. “Justice for Oscar Grant: A Lost Opportunity?”. Advance the Struggle, July 15, 2009.
- ↩ Netfa Freeman, “Movement Ferguson, Beware the Nonprofit Industrial Complex”. Black Agenda Report, January 21, 2015.
- ↩ BOLD. “Board”. BOLD.
- ↩ Borealis Philanthropy. “Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity”.
- ↩ BOLD (Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity) Funding Page.
- ↩ “Let me be clear: we do not advocate violence in protests of any kind—not by any protester and not by police. We do not advocate or condone destruction of property. We believe in the value of human lives.” Reddit.
- ↩ Patrick Reusse. “Stephen Jackson, other activists score with straight talk at Minneapolis City Hall rotunda.” Minneapolis Star Tribune, May 30, 2020.
- ↩ Adair Mosley. “Justice for George Floyd”. Pillsbury United Communities, June 2, 2020.
- ↩ Greater Twin Cities United Way. “Corporate Partners” .
- ↩ Kari Paul. “How Target, Google, Bank of America and Microsoft quietly fund police through private donations”. The Guardian, June 18, 2020.
- ↩ Minneapolis Department of Health & Family Support. “City of Minneapolis Weed & Seed Initiative”.
- ↩ Community Capacity Development Office, U.S. Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs. Weed and Seed Implementation Manual.
- ↩ Kristian Williams, “The other side of the COIN: counterinsurgency and community policing,” Interface, Vol 3, No 1, May 2011.
- ↩ “FBI recognizes Pillsbury United Communities for its service to diverse neighborhoods.” Minneapolis Star Tribune, December 15, 2014.
- ↩ Working Group on Police-Involved Deadly Force Encounters. “Executive Summary of Recommendations”, 2.
- ↩ R. T. Rybak. “I Was the Mayor of Minneapolis and I Know Our Cops Have a Problem”. Benchmark Analytics, June 2, 2020.
- ↩ August H. Nimtz. “The Graveyard of Progressive Social Movements: The Black Hole of the Democratic Party”. MR Online, May 9, 2017.
- ↩ Brian Schwartz, “How Joe Biden’s leading VP contenders stack up in the wake of protests over George Floyd’s death”. CNBC, June 1, 2020; Daniel Strauss, “’A national crisis’: how the killing of George Floyd is changing U.S. politics”. The Guardian, May 30, 2020; Nicholas Fandos, “Congress Plans Hearings on Racial Violence and Use of Force by the Police”. New York Times, May 29, 2020.
- ↩ Suzanne Gamboa, “Joe Biden pulls Julian Castro into campaign, asks for help to ‘tackle police reform’”. NBC News, June 2, 2020.
- ↩ Kelsey Snell, Claudia Grisales. “Pelosi Asks Black Caucus To Come Up With Police Reforms Following Protests”. NPR, June 2, 2020.
- ↩ Catie Edmondson, “Democrats Unveil Sweeping Bill Targeting Police Misconduct and Racial Bias”, The New York Times, June 8, 2020.
- ↩ Lisa Mascaro, “Police overhaul dims, but House Democrats push ahead on vote”. Police One, June 25, 2020.
- ↩ German Lopez, “The controversial 1994 crime law that Joe Biden helped write, explained”. Vox, June 20, 2019.
- ↩ Glen Ford, “The Movement Gets BIG—and Its Enemies Reveal Themselves”. Black Agenda Report, June 4, 2020.
- ↩ Danny Haiphong, “The Rebellion Against Police Repression Must Guard Against ALL Enemies, Whether Red, Blue, or Green”, Black Agenda Report, June 17, 2020.
- ↩ Justine Coleman, “Warren endorsed by Black Lives Matter co-founder’s Black to the Future Action Fund”, The Hill, February 20, 2020.
- ↩ “BLM’s #WhatMatters2020”, Black Lives Matter.
- ↩ Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism.
- ↩ Barack Obama, “How to Make this Moment the Turning Point for Real Change”, June 1, 2020.
- ↩ Kim Parker, Juliana Menasce Horowitz, Monica Anderson. “Amid Protests, Majorities Across Racial and Ethnic Groups Express Support for the Black Lives Matter Movement”. Pew Research Center, June 12, 2020.
- ↩ TooFab Staff, “DC Protestors Drag Rioter Into Police Custody”. Too Fab, June 1, 2020.
- ↩ Vincent Barone, “Accused Wendy’s arsonist Natalie White was Rayshard Brooks’ ‘girlfriend’: lawyer”. New York Post, June 23, 2020.
- ↩ Lisa Hagen, “Al Sharpton Calls for Aug. 28 March on Washington at George Floyd Memorial”. U.S. News, June 4, 2020.
- ↩ “#DefundThePolice”. Black Lives Matter, May 30, 2020.
- ↩ Miarame Kaba, “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police.” The New York Times, June 12, 2020.
- ↩ Sean Boynton, “What does ‘defund the police’ really mean? Experts say confusion harming progress”. Global News, June 18, 2020; Amanda Arnold, “What Exactly Does It Mean to Defund the Police?”. The Cut, June 12, 2020; Andrew Ferguson, “‘Defund the Police’ Does Not Mean Defund the Police. Unless It Does.”. The Atlantic, June 14, 2020.
- ↩ “Invest-Divest”. Movement for Black Lives.
- ↩ Mike Walker, “The difference between police defunding and police disbanding”. Police One, June 18, 2020.
- ↩ Emily Dixon, “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Was Asked About Defunding the Police and Her Answer Went Viral”. Marie Claire, June 12, 2020.
- ↩ Scott Pham, “Police Arrested More Than 11,000 People At Protests Across The U.S.”. BuzzFeed News, June 2, 2020.
- ↩ Jan Ransom, “Despite Virus, Hundreds Arrested in Unrest Are Held in Cramped Jails”. The New York Times, June 4, 2020.
- ↩ Greg Doucette, George Floyd Protest Police Brutality Videos.
- ↩ “Violence and controversies during the George Floyd protests”. Wikipedia.
- ↩ Stephen Gandel, “At least 40 lawsuits claim police brutality at George Floyd protests across U.S.”. CBS News, June 23, 2020.
- ↩ Rainer Shea, “Intelligence leaks reveal just how ready the police state is to crack down on dissent.” June 25, 2020.
- ↩ Chris Brooks, “After Barr Ordered FBI to “Identify Criminal Organizers,” Activists Were Intimidated at Home and at Work”. The Intercept_, June 12, 2020.
- ↩ Katie Warren and Joey Hadden, “How all 50 states are responding to the George Floyd protests, from imposing curfews to calling in the National Guard”. Business Insider, June 4, 2020.
- ↩ Dylan Lovan, Bruce Schreiner. “Investigators: Man fatally shot on night of protests was killed by Kentucky National Guard rifle”. Military Times, June 9, 2020.
- ↩ Maria Sacchetti, “Curfews follow days of looting and demonstrations.” The Washington Post, June 1, 2020.
- ↩ Christina Wilkie, Amanda Macias. “Trump threatens to deploy military as George Floyd protests continue to shake the U.S.”. CNBC, June 1, 2020.
- ↩ FBI Counterterrorism Division. “(U) White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement”.
- ↩ Rachel E. Greenspan, “Oregon police told armed white men that they didn’t want to look like they were ‘playing favorites’ when they advised them to stay inside after curfew”. Insider, June 5, 2020.
- ↩ Craig Timberg, “As Trump warns of leftist violence, a dangerous threat emerges from the right-wing boogaloo movement”. The Washington Post, June 17, 2020.
- ↩ Rachel E. Greenspan, “Violent counter-protesters mobbed a small-town BLM demonstration in Ohio amid false rumors of antifa”. Insider, June 16, 2020.
- ↩ Lee Brown, “Men in Ku Klux Klan-style hoods crash Nevada Black Lives Matter rally”. New York Post, June 11, 2020.
- ↩ “KKK ‘leader’ charged for attack on Black Lives Matter protesters”. BBC News, June 9, 2020.
- ↩ Kelly Weill, “The Far Right Is Stirring Up Violence at Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone”. The Daily Beast, June 16, 2020.
- ↩ Konstantin Toropin, “Another shooting in Seattle’s police-free autonomous zone kills man and critically injures boy”. CNN, June 29, 2020.
- ↩ “‘American Patriots’ are planning to retake the so-called Seattle “autonomous zone” from CHAZ insurrectionists”. Law Enforcement Today, June 16, 2020.
Source: MROnline
#copaganda #CounterInsurgency #Ferguson #GeorgeFloyd #GeorgeFloydRebellion #GeorgeFloydUprising #insurgency #WhatMatters2020
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Introduction
On May 25, 2020, police in Minneapolis Minnesota murdered George Floyd in cold blood. Responding to allegations of counterfeit money, police arrested Floyd, with one officer kneeling on his neck for nearly nine minutes, ultimately suffocating him. The killing was captured on video and quickly spread across the internet.
Protests soon followed. The first protest organized in Minneapolis was on May 26. By May 28 the protests had spread to the nearby cities of St Paul and Duluth with riots occurring in Minneaopolis that evening. Mostly notably, the third precinct of the Minneapolis Police Department was besieged and burned. Minnesota activated the National Guard on May 29 in response to the unrest.1 The American state’s disastrous response to COVID-19, massive unemployment, and indiscriminate police killings that disproportionately target people of colour provided the impetus for an enormous and unprecedented outpouring of rage; protests, many of them violently targeting the police, spread across the United States like wildfire.
While the initial uprising was ferocious in its explosive anger and militancy, within just three weeks the protests seem to have been channeled largely into the decidedly less militant demand of “Defund the police.” What happened? I largely agree with what Kandist Mallett wrote in a brilliant article in Teen Vogue, in which she argued that: “those in power…are working tirelessly to destroy this wave of unrest before it becomes a tsunami they cannot control.… They are trying to kill this movement.”2 The defanging of the George Floyd Uprising was not accidental but was rather a deliberate attempt on the part of the American ruling class to regain social control in the wake of the most militant protests in recent memory—and, as a movement, possibly the largest in U.S. history.
What I want to do in this article is to examine the dimensions of how this defanging took place: how, within the space of two weeks, we went from burning down a police station to making small budgetary demands. I argue that the massive effort to defang the George Floyd Uprising should be understood as a deliberate counter-insurgency operation, combining the (sometimes coordinated) efforts of: various police forces, the capitalist media, the American military, NGOs, the Democrats, both state and federal governments, and other liberal establishment figures. What I also want to show is that these efforts were not extraordinary: there was no shadowy conspiracy to intervene. Rather, each of these apparatuses functioned exactly as intended to in order to defend the existing capitalist order. By examining the response to the George Floyd Uprising, the left can gain a better understanding of just how difficult it will be to overthrow capitalism and the capitalist state and potentially avoid pitfalls in the future.
Before continuing, I want to address the initial and most obvious opposition to my argument. If the efforts to defang the protests should be understood as a counter-insurgency, then it stands to reason that the George Floyd Uprising should be considered an insurgency. Is this not hyperbolic? Given the extent of the crisis of legitimacy the protests created for the American state, I do not think it is hyperbolic at all. As Kristian Williams argued in “The other side of the COIN: counterinsurgency and community policing”, insurgency and counter-insurgency is precisely the lens through which the American state views much of its domestic policing activity, from gang-related operations through to protest management.3
The uprising truly created a crisis of legitimacy for the American state. It needs to be stated outright that the burning of a police station and the forced retreat, under siege, of the police inside is unprecedented in the history of modern American protest. The vulnerability of the police was put on full display: the following night police were attacked in Los Angeles and New York, among other locations. The National Guard was deployed throughout the United States. While not as historically unprecedented for dealing with dissent, there were concerns, at least in Minnesota, that the National Guard would be insufficient to quell the uprising. Governor Tim Walz on May 30 in the Minneapolis Star Tribune: “We do not have the numbers… We cannot arrest people when we are trying to hold ground.”4 Three days later, a Senior Airman in the Minnesota National Guard said in an interview that he was “waiting for the scales to tip” with regards to the “riot purgatory” that existed; the National Guard had, as of June 2, been unable to gain control of the city.5 Trump was even rushed to his White House bunker in response to protests in Washington D.C.; the last time those bunkers were used was during the September 11 attacks.6 Transit workers used their collective power to refuse to transport arrested protestors.7 Inspired by the protests, longshore workers of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union struck and shut down ports across the West Coast in mid-June.8 And in terms of putting numbers to the crisis of legitimacy faced by the American state, on June 3 a Monmouth University survey reported that 54% of Americans thought that the burning of the precinct was justified, higher than the level of support enjoyed by either Biden or Trump.9
Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency
The United States military, in Joint Publication 3-24: Counterinsurgency, defines an insurgency as: “The organized use of subversion and violence to seize, nullify, or challenge political control of a region.” Counter-insurgency then is defined as “Comprehensive civilian and military efforts designed to simultaneously defeat and contain insurgency and address its root causes.”10
It is worth quoting from the manual at length to demonstrate the sophistication with which the U.S. Military approaches counter-insurgency operations.
Highlighting the specificity of counter-insurgency operations, the manual argues that:
COIN [counter-insurgency] is distinguished from traditional warfare due to the focus of its operations—a relevant population—and its strategic purpose—to gain or maintain control or influence over—and the support of that relevant population through political, psychological, and economic methods.11
Central to how the U.S. Military sees insurgency is the question of political legitimacy:
The struggle for legitimacy with the relevant population is typically a central theme of the conflict between the insurgency and the HN [host nation] government. The HN government generally needs some level of legitimacy among the population to retain the confidence of the populace and an acknowledgment of governing power. The insurgency will attack the legitimacy of the HN government while attempting to develop its own legitimacy with the population. COIN should reduce the credibility of the insurgency while strengthening the legitimacy of the HN government.12
And in turn, central to the question of legitimacy is the task of building and controlling narratives:
COIN planners should compose a unifying message (the COIN narrative) that is consistent with the overarching USG narrative, which is coupled to the USG [U.S. government] objective. Narrative is a structure of planned themes from which both messages and actions are developed. Narrative provides a common thread of communicative influence. The objective speaks to desired outcome; narrative communicates the story of the how and why of an operation. Common themes within a COIN narrative may be: reinforcing the credibility and perception of legitimacy of the HN and USG COIN operation, exploiting the negative aspects of the insurgent efforts, and preemptively presenting the expected insurgent argument along with counter-arguments. … The COIN narrative should be the result of meticulous target-audience analysis conducted by cultural and language subject matter experts … The COIN narrative should provide the guidance from which themes, actions, and messages can be planned in support of the COIN objectives.13
Narrative construction and control is reiterated in practical terms later in the Manual:
In COIN, the information flow can be roughly divided into information which the USG requires to guide its political-military approach (i.e., knowledge of local conditions) and information which the USG wishes to disseminate to influence populations. At the same time, counterinsurgents also seek to impede the information flow of insurgent groups—both their intelligence collection and their ability to influence the relevant population. 14
One of the tactics emphasized to impede the ability of insurgents to influence the target population is working with local authorities—especially non-governmental ones like religious leaders, and NGOs- to coopt the message of the insurgency and explicitly to moderate it.15 This latter point is extremely important; while moderate movements may enjoy more popular support, they are also far less successful at winning their demands.16 It is therefore in the interest of those defend the existing order to support the moderate elements of a movement.
All this is to say then that the U.S. Military understands insurgency and counter-insurgency as being not just a military question, but rather a question of politics. To this end, the Manual heavily emphasizes the importance of political action in counter-insurgency operations:
To be effective, officials involved in COIN should address two imperatives—political action and security—with equal urgency, recognizing that insurgency is fundamentally an armed political competition…. COIN functions, therefore, include informational, security, political, economic, and development components, all of which are designed to support the overall objective of establishing and consolidating control by the HN government. … This is the core of COIN, because it provides a framework around which all other programs and activities are organized. As described above, depending on the root causes of the insurgency, the strategy may involve elements of political reform, reconciliation, popular mobilization, and governmental capacity building.17
If we understand insurgency and counter-insurgency as involving both a military and political aspect, in which the political is primary, with insurgency being primarily about building a counter-legitimacy to the state and counter-insurgency being primarily about the political isolation of insurgents through the creation of narratives, we can begin to see how such an understanding is useful to apply to American domestic politics. The George Floyd Uprising saw insurgents directly undermine the legitimacy of the existing state, especially the police, through both armed and political action. In turn, the state and establishment responded with both armed and political actions, the latter in the form of co-optation and narrative control.
But the connections between American counter-insurgency and domestic politics are not just on the discursive level. In “The other side of the COIN: counterinsurgency and community policing”, Kristian Williams provides an excellent overview of the material relationship between American military counter-insurgency programs and American policing. This is specifically evident with regard to trends towards the militarization of the police and so-called “Community Policing” initiatives. Williams demonstrates how, in a modern example of the “imperial boomerang”18, many of the methods employed by modern police forces were developed and refined by the American military, including during its occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. In turn, the military partnered with police forces to learn how to better control conquered populations, be they black people living in American cities or Iraqis living under American occupation in Iraq.19
Of particular interest is the role that NGOs play in this process. As was noted earlier, the U.S. Military makes special mention of NGOs in the process of counter-insurgency. An earlier version of the Manual, published in 2006 and authored by David Petraeus, is more explicit, remarking that “some of the best weapons for counterinsurgents do not shoot” and referring to NGOs as “force-multipliers”. Williams is able to show how NGOs were directly involved in de-escalating responses of the community to murders committed by American police in Oakland, as well as involved in anti-gang activities in Boston. Both of these separate efforts fall under the playbook of counter-insurgency.20
Before going in depth into the George Floyd Uprising, it is worthwhile looking at the “why” of counter-insurgency. Why is it that the police and military have developed a comprehensive strategy intended to undermine threats to the existing order? Fundamentally, the modern state exists to protect the interests of the capitalist class—namely the continuation of capital accumulation and exploitation—against the interests of everyone else. In turn, specific states exist to protect the specific interests of their specific capitalist classes. Thus anything that attempts to undermine capitalism, or the ability of capitalists to exploit, must be itself undermined. The state has a myriad of tools at its disposal to help with this process. Some are ideological (they convince people exploitation is in their own interest) whereas others, like the police, are repressive. Insofar as the goal of counter-insurgency is ultimately to protect the accumulation of capital, we should understand counter-insurgency as extending beyond just the actions of the repressive apparatuses of the state. What I will explore below is that in this case, counter-insurgency was a joint effort of the entire American ruling class, both inside and outside the state, to defang the George Floyd Uprising. The American ruling class used both violent and non-violent means to defang the uprising: they deployed what could be called a carrot-and-stick approach in order to protect the social order.
The Carrot…
The Media Narrative
In the days following the murder of George Floyd, the media worked tirelessly to defang the George Floyd Uprising. They did this not by creating reality through discourse, but by selectively and pointedly reporting on certain aspects of reality. As a result, they encouraged people to think about the uprising in specific ways, and in turned called them into action in specific ways. I will focus primarily on the Minneapolis Star Tribune; the narrative trends developed there were later repeated in media across the United States.
Initial media reaction to the uprising directly condemned property destruction. After a Target was looted on the night of May 27, the Star Tribune spent the following day reporting on the impact that riots would have on small businesses.21 True to form, the Star Tribune printed a call for peace from the family and partner of George Floyd22 as well as from “political, faith, community leaders” calling for an “end to riots.”23 The latter story was particularly interesting insofar as the group was called together for a conference by Minnesota governor Tim Walz, and included both church leaders and NGO managers. Here is an example of a top state official picking and choosing who counts as a “community leader” without direct input from the community. In turn, the Star Tribune reported on the meeting treating these externally hand-picked “community leaders” as though their legitimacy derived from the community itself.
In the following days, the Star Tribune shifted focus to the human cost of the riots to the local community. The publication blamed the riots for creating a food desert due to the closing of large corporate grocery stores.24 Rioters were also blamed for the lack of access to medicine now faced by the local community due to the closure of pharmacies.25 Rioters were alleged to have burned down nearly 200 units of affordable housing, thus exacerbating the housing crisis.26 The riots were also allegedly responsible for devastating Minneapolis’ famed Lake Street, home to immigrant-owned business and a hub, according to the Star Tribune, of multi-culturalism.27
In its discussion of the immediate impact of the uprising on the local community, not once did the Star Tribune go beyond surface-level condemnations of the rioters. Suddenly concerned with access to food and medication, the stories did not include discussions as to why the closure of a few grocery stores could create a food desert. There was no discussion on the increased price of food and wealth-disparity. There was no discussion on the monopolization of food sources by large chains. There was no discussion on the effects of for-profit healthcare on access to medicine. No discussions on gentrification and stagnant wages leading to the necessity of specifically designated “affordable” housing. No discussions on the context of the riots: namely 40 million unemployed Americans staring down a pandemic with miniscule government relief. No discussion of looting as a means of getting necessities such as medicine, food, and clothing; no discussion as to why Target and pharmacies became targets. Instead the riots were presented largely without context, as simply an irrational outburst of anger, alone causing problems to the community. Those fighting back against the existing order were blamed for the worst effects of the very order they fought against.
In addition to direct condemnation, the Star Tribune also took a more nuanced approach to the riots. Instead of the riots being an organic expression of community anger, they were presented—both by the media, and the government—as being the work of (usually white) “outside agitators”. Rioting was purported to be the work of secret white-supremacists that had infiltrated the protests in order to cause mayhem. In that same meeting of community leaders called together by Tim Walz on May 30, the executive director of the Council for Minnesotans of African Heritage put it succinctly: “White people from other communities are coming into my community, our communities as some kind of perverse poetry, as if it wasn’t bad enough already. … Go home now. The fascists on the plan right now, turn around.”28 The Star Tribune reported on an Illinois man who had been arrested with explosives in Minneapolis, who had specifically traveled there to riot.29 The mayor of St Paul and the governor of Minnesota had each tweeted that the vast majority -80% to all- of the arrestees in the week preceding June 6 had been from out-of-state despite the fact that there was no evidence to back up such claims. The claims were so ludicrous that the Star Tribune ran a story walking back many of the claims about outside agitators; well after the damage had been done to the protests.30
The goal of these various media narratives—first, condemning the riots; second, emphasizing the damage to the community; and third, blaming outside agitators- was to drive a dual process of bifurcation within the protest movement. The goal of the ruling class was on the one hand to separate “peaceful” liberal protestors from the more radical element, both to avoid radicalization of the moderate protestors but also to isolate the radicals within the movement. Second, the goal was to lump the radical protestors together with apolitical opportunist looters, whether or not the latter group actually existed, and in turn ignore the radical critiques of both policing and society as a whole that the radicals put forward. Thus the establishment attempted to call into being two groups: a group of good, peaceful, moderate protestors; and a second group of opportunist, violent protestors who did not care about the injustice the protests were about. The tactics and message of the first group was to be lauded, whereas the tactics and message of the second group was to be condemned.
Meanwhile, seemingly out of nowhere, another narrative appeared in the media. Across both social and traditional media outlets, stories appeared showing police supporting the protests. Most famous were the images of police (and sometimes National Guard) kneeling with the protestors. Often times this was displayed as the result of a request from the “good protestors”, who were then portrayed as applauding police initiative. However, in this case reality cut through the media spin: the American police were simply too vicious for their “spontaneous” (more on this below) outpouring of empathy to be taken seriously. There were abundant accounts of the same police transitioning from kneeling to attacking protestors within the space of hours.
As the protests spread in the early weeks of June, it was no longer possible for the media to rely on the “outside agitator” platitude. Indeed, with protests in literally every major city in the United States, there was no “outside” for the agitators to come from. And with the utter inhumanity of the police on full display, stories of police taking a knee simply didn’t hold water. The media then turned to focusing almost exclusively on the efforts of liberal NGOs engaged in “rebuilding” efforts31, and the activities of the “good” protestors. The degree to which the “good” protestors were signal-boosted by the media is evident in the speed at which the “Defund the Police” slogan, itself a moderated version of the already moderate “abolish the police” demand, became the public rallying cry of the movement as a whole.32 Finally, towards mid-June, with the protests now largely contained and the radical element isolated, the media began largely ignoring the massive protests that are still occurring, instead only providing local coverage of incidental events.
While I have focused largely on the narrative created in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the same pattern (from demonization, to outside agitators, to focusing on the community cost, the good/bad protestor division, the police sympathy, to NGOs and liberals, to ultimately ignoring the movement) was a pattern that was repeated more-or-less within all major media sources in North America. Why was this the case? The similarity in editorial line between media companies does not indicate direct coordination between media onwers nor does it point to state intervention or censorship. Rather, insofar as media in North America is either owned by large corporations or run by the state, the commonality of interests that exists between rich owners and rich state managers is inevitably reflected in the editorial line of the media which they run.33 It makes total sense then that the media would relay a narrative which had as its effect the defanging of the George Floyd Uprising; such an action was absolutely within the interests of the large capitalists which control the media. The capitalist class, by owning the media and therefore controlling its content, was able to utilize media narratives as part of the counter-insurgency effort against the George Floyd Uprising.
In the case of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the connection between ownership and editorial line could not be clearer. Glen Taylor, the billionaire former state senator, admitted as much when he bought the newspaper in 2014. In an interview with MinnPost, he stated that his ownership of the paper would result in the editorial line being less liberal.34 It is unsurprising then that the overall editorial position of the paper reflects Taylor’s public position, namely that the problem is not specifically law enforcement and that protests are only legitimate if they are peaceful.35 Insofar as the George Floyd Uprising threatened the existing order in Minneapolis, an order that Glen Taylor benefitted from, the Star Tribune would come out against the uprising. This same process played out across the United States over the course of the uprising.
The Copaganda Machine
No account of how the media treated the George Floyd Uprising would be complete without a discussion of something that is often overlooked in accounts of reactionary media spin: the absolutely massive public relations machine employed by the police themselves. While it is possible that the speed with which stories of police “taking a knee” with protestors went viral was entirely natural, it is far more likely that in the wake of the largest anti-police protests in a generation that the police PR machine jumped into overdrive.
The goal of police public relations (PR) is, like any public relations campaign, to influence how the public views the police. In one article written for Police One, the largest English-language online community of police boasting literally tens of thousands of members, the point of police PR is described as “to establish a positive relationship with the community before an incident occurs.” The point of PR is directly contextualized to counteract the public’s reactions to racist police terror: “Events dating back to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, Rodney King, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray and others have been covered extensively in the media and have tarnished the reputation of many agencies. The public relations team must establish or repair the image of the agency within the community.”36 In another article on the same website, another officer describes the utility of “branding” (using a PR campaign to build a police “brand”) insofar as it allows police departments to control messaging and make clear a department’s “value proposition.”37 The goal of branding is to build preconceptions about the role of police, thus filtering any observations through the preconceived image of how police should act. This allows the police to have greater impunity in their actions, as anything they do is seen immediately through the lens of police being good and necessary protectors.
On the surface this seems fairly obvious and innocuous. All firms employ PR strategies in one form or another, in which the firm seeks to use the media to influence public reaction to the firm. However if we consider the social role of police, namely a repressive apparatus of the capitalist state designed to protect the conditions which allow for exploitation, the police use of PR becomes more sinister. Police directly attempt to manipulate public perceptions of their actions in their favour, including racist murder.
How widespread is the police use of PR? It is difficult to say. An examination of several police budgets over the past years of cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Toronto turned up little information; the police are remarkably good at concealing precisely what they spend their money on. There is some scattered information though that suggests that the police spend a staggering amount on PR. For instance, in 2016 the Denver Police Department was revealed to have spent $1.3 million over three years on its “media relations unit”.38 The Metropolitan Police in the UK had, in 2015, a 10 million pound annual PR budget that employed 100 communications staff, with a police across the UK spending 36 million pounds annually on PR.39 The LAPD, rather than just employing a Public Information Officer (PIO), has an entire Public Relations Unit.40 In Toronto, the 2019 police budget requested an additional $7.9 million to be partially used on nine new positions in the Corporate Communications Unit, increasing the total staff from 16 to 25, to be used to “help increase capabilities in public relations, internal communication and digital strategy.”41 And in 2020, the NYPD allotted $3.2 million for public relations, in order to tell their “side of the story.”42
Direct police department expenses on PR are just one of the PR avenues available to police. Police unions also hire PR firms to improve the image of their officers or to advance specific goals.43 Individual police officers can also hire PR firms to represent them in times of need. One such service, Cop PRotect, allows officers to pay $50 per month for guaranteed representation if something should go wrong. In a story placed in Police Magazine, the need for such a service is related directly to the Ferguson Uprising:
Cops today are completely at the mercy of activists who don’t care about the truth … Darren Wilson was nearly murdered and now lives in hiding, while the man who tried to kill him is declared a hero by activists. Cop PRotect gives cops like Darren Wilson a trusted friend to tell their stories in ways agency information officers, union representatives and the media cannot or will not.44
In this case, the firm was created directly to mitigate community blowback against individual officers in the wake of racist police terror.
While the amount that is spent on pro-police PR is hard to find, the indirect effects make it more obvious. Indeed, there exists an entire parasitic cottage industry of pro-police PR firms and consulting services, which exist solely to increase public perceptions in the police. For instance, a quick search turned up John Guilfoil Public Relations which specializes in the public sector, including the police. A testimonial from the chief of the Massachusetts Police Department states that the firm “provides an extremely valuable service to those agencies that want to be proactive in … getting out a positive message to the community.”45 PolicePR in Indiana offers a Public Information Officer boot camp, in partnership with the Greenwood Police Department.46 Melissa Agnes, a crisis management strategist who has been featured on Police One, has a whole series of articles and talks dealing specifically with police misconduct, ranging from “Discussing the Divide Between Police and Their Communities” to “Discussing The #Ferguson Crisis with Tim Burrows”.47 None of these firms or services would exist if the police were not paying for them.
Police PR strategies are not limited to traditional media. To give the strategies a more organic feel, police forces and their hired PR firms make frequent use of social media in order to help control the narrative around their actions. Police Chief Magazine warns officers that “Hiding and Hoping is Not a PR Strategy”; police forces not only need to monitor social media to see what perception of the police force is after an incident, but must also build “a social media presence”. This latter point can include spreading information about a suspect in the event that video showing police misconduct spreads.48 As part of the U.S. Department of Justice’s ‘Community Oriented Policing Services’ (COPS) Strategic Communication Practices guide, there is an entire section on the importance of social media.49 Another article on Police One suggests that police departments send officers onto Reddit, both to get ahead of a story, but also to intervene in the discussions as police.50 These efforts can be bolstered by using “community outreach programs” to “build an online army of supporters.”51
Lest anyone think that the police simply use social media to inform their audience about their activities, the police consciously use social media to manipulate public opinion during moments of crisis. Taken from another Police One article (a fantastic resource for those wanting to understand the mindset of police), this one published ominously on May 28, 2020, titled “12 things every police department’s civil unrest plan needs”, there is an entire section on social media. Departments are instructed to be aware that protestors can use social media to amplify and coordinate their activity; departments should also be aware and be ready to counter those that would “lower the perception of [their] department.” If that fails, there’s always the National Guard.52 Force Science News published an article/advertisement featuring Melissa Agnes in 2018, which advised departments to have prepared a ‘Communications Bible’ to help navigate crises such as “officer-involved shootings”.53 In a mid-June Police One leadership briefing, after weeks of anti-police protests, authors mockingly reflected: “Now do you recognize the power of social media?” arguing that police “must start viewing… social media as an integral tool in policing.”54
All this is to say there exists a massive and highly coordinated police PR machine, which the police use to try and directly control media narratives in their favour. They do this as part of a broader effort to maintain the current social order. While it is impossible to prove this soon, I strongly suspect that it was this machine which was responsible for the flood of sympathetic stories about the police that featured prominently across traditional and social media in early June. Despite the best efforts of the police, their unions, and their employed PR firms, they were unable to shift the broader media narrative for more than a few days; the brutal actions of police across the United States spoke for themselves and undermined attempts to portray the police in a positive light.
While ultimately unsuccessful, the wave of pro-police media in early June gave credibility to the more moderate argument that the institution of policing itself is not the problem, but rather that it is only some “bad apples” amidst an otherwise salvageable police force. This in turn gave more ideological power to moderate and liberal elements, the so-called “good protestors”, within the broader protest movement. To tie this back into counter-insurgency, control over information in the form of both narrative construction and information dissemination is one of the main tools of counter-insurgency strategies. The police consciously did just this, and in the process strengthened the moderates within the movement.
The Non-Profit Industrial Complex
As noted earlier, the U.S. military considers NGO partnerships to be a vital part of counter-insurgency efforts. Much has been written about the negative effects of non-profits on social movements. In the classic collection of essays titled The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, Andrea Smith argues that capital and the capitalist state use nonprofits to: monitor and control social movements, divert public resources into private hands, manage and control dissent, redirect activist efforts towards careerism and away from mass-based modes of organizing, allow corporations to mask exploitation through philanthropy, and encourage social movements to model themselves in terms of structure and politics after capitalist models.55 For the purposes of this essay, I want to focus on two areas: first, how NGOs have a moderating effect on the politics of a movement. Second, I will talk about how NGOs frequently work with the police to protect the current social order under the guise of changing it.
How is it that non-profits are able to moderate social movements? The capitalist class is well aware of their own interests and spends an inordinate amount of money defending them. In the process, they create philanthropic foundations. These philanthropic foundations not only allow capitalists to transfer wealth inter-generationally without taxation (giving their children positions in the foundations) but also fund charitable activities, such as non-profits. There is a catch though: the capitalists will not fund anything that does not fit their interests, namely the continuation of exploitation. They are happy, for instance, to fund affordable housing initiatives insofar as those initiatives do not tackle the root causes of homelessness, namely private property. Capitalist foundations therefore provide resources to NGOs which act in line with their interests. In turn, NGOs knowingly moderate themselves in order to better secure resources. Furthermore respectable NGOs can become the public face of a movement, effectively forcing the more radical organizations out of the public eye.
The Civil Rights and anti-police movements are full of examples of the moderating effects of NGOs. For instance, in the 1960s white philanthropist Stephen Currier set up the Council for United Civil Rights Leadership in order to channel foundation funding to Civil Rights groups. The so-called ‘Big Six’ were brought together; of the six, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the most radical of the groups, received the least amount of funding. More radical groups, such as the Nation of Islam, were completely excluded. In 1963 Malcolm X specifically criticized the Big Six and the Council for United Civil Rights Leadership in his famous ‘Message to the Grass Roots’ speech in which he reflected on the March on Washington which had taken place earlier that year.56 The goal of these maneuvers by white philanthropists was clear: fund the more moderate element of the Civil Rights movement to avoid the movement taking a radical turn and undermining the ability for American capitalism to operate.57
Fast forward 50 years, and the same pattern reoccurs. In Oakland in 2009, non-profits directly intervened to deradicalize the response to the killing of Oscar Grant. Ahead of a major rally in January 2009, the Oakland police arranged meetings with various nonprofit and church leaders in order to defang the protests before they even began.58 Religious leaders asked their congregations to not attend the protests. A coalition of NGOs came together and formed the Coalition Against Police Execution (CAPE). CAPE explicitly called for a lack of militancy in their protests, and stood as a physical barrier between police and protestors. 59 In turn, CAPE became the public, legitimate face of the protests, which was reinforced through media coverage.
The uprising in 2014 in Ferguson saw a similar process play itself out. There the NGO influence was given an organizational existence in the form of Black Lives Matter. I want to be clear here; when speaking of Black Lives Matter I am talking about the official organization and not the broader movement of the same name. Black Lives Matter, while first conceived of in 2013, organized its first major action in 2014 with the Black Lives Matter Freedom Ride in response to the killing of Michael Brown by the Ferguson police. Black Lives Matter became the public face of the movement. Despite the Ferguson uprising originating in riots, Black Lives Matter and other organizations planned a series of actions over the course of the summer of 2014 that channeled local activism into safer and less rebellious avenues.
Following the Ferguson uprising, moderate elements of the Black Lives Matter movement became a relatively safe outlet for liberals to support and into which the capitalist class could channel outrage. Black Lives Matter and the constellation of new organizations and networks around it received an absolutely immense amount of donations from larger donors like The Ford Foundation and George Soros.60 The more liberal elements of the movement, able to secure donations, were able to take centre-stage. For instance, one recipient, the Organization for Black Struggle, used some of its funding to create the Hands Up Coalition. This coalition popularized the “hands up, don’t shoot” slogan used by protestors; this ran against slogans by more militant black power activists such as “arms up, shoot back” and “fists up, fight back”. More radical yet equally active groups, such as the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, received no funding. In 2016, Black Lives Matter and 27 other organizations, as part of the Movement for Black Lives, issued a platform of demands titled A Vision for Black Lives. Rather than a comprehensive plan and program to mobilize the masses to fight for their own liberation, the document is a set of policy guidelines. The effect is that efforts are taken off the streets and channeled into traditional power structures where they are ultimately destined to fail.
The founders of Black Lives Matter were first introduced to each other through an NGO known as Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity (BOLD). The board of directors of BOLD, those who decide its political direction, is made up of managers of other NGOS.61 BOLD also receives an immense sum of money from private donors, such as through the “philanthropic intermediary” known as Borealis Philanthropy62 and through Funders for Justice.63 This latter group, also created in response to the Ferguson Uprising, in turn receives funding from The Ford Foundation and the Open Society Foundations; hardly groups interested in a radical transformation of the social order or the end of exploitation. I don’t bring this up to allege a conspiracy that Black Lives Matter is being secretly run by The Ford Foundation, but rather to show that even Black Lives Matter has its origins within the non-profit industrial complex milieu, which in turn effects its politics. Turning back to the George Floyd Uprising, it is unsurprising that in a recent Reddit Ask-Me-Anything, Kailee Scales, the Managing Director for Black Lives Matter, condemned the riots and announced efforts to channel the George Floyd Uprising into voter registration and “civic engagement” through the #WhatMatters2020 campaign.64
The ways in which non-profits have attempted to moderate explosions of rage during the George Floyd Uprising are too many to list. One example I want to focus on, however, is particularly telling. On May 30, two days after the burning of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis, a local non-profit called Pillsbury United Communities had a press conference. Pillsbury United Communities is an incredibly well established NGO; founded in 1879, it runs a number of outreach and education programs, community programs (such as free COVID-19 testing), as well as “social enterprises” including a grocery store. The press conference on May 30 brought together Jamie Foxx, Stephen Jackson, BLM activist Tamika Mallory, alongside George Floyd’s family. Speakers were explicit in their calls for peaceful protests, but generally did not condemn the riots. A peaceful rally followed.65 Thus at the height of the militant protests, people were asked by “legitimate” community leaders to temper their anger and engage in traditionally and easily ignored protests. These calls were amplified by liberals outside the community and the media.
A few days after the rally, Pillsbury United Communities used George Floyd’s death to issue a fundraising call; it is unclear from their website how the money will be used to ensure “Justice for George Floyd”.66 But individual donations are not the only way that Pillsbury United Communities raises funds. It also receives donations from massive foundations such as the Greater Twin Cities United Way, the Minneapolis Foundation, and the St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation. The United Way, for instance, acts as a “philanthropic intermediary”, collection donations from large corporations, and then granting money to non-profits. In this specific case, the money given to Pillsbury United Communities comes from sources such as 3M, U.S. Bank, Cargill, and Target.67 The latter, notably, also provides hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to police foundations.68 One can see the issue of an organization fighting for justice against the police having similar funding sources to the police themselves. It is also unlikely that the capitalist class would fund those capable of truly undermining it.
That an NGO intervened in a mass struggle to both channel the movement in a more liberal direction while monopolizing resources is not particularly surprising. What is particularly interesting though is Pillsbury United Communities’ connection to community policing. A 2006 report by the Minneapolis Department of Health & Family Support lists Waite House, a Pillsbury United Communities site, as a “Weed & Seed Safe Haven”.69 Weed and Seed programs, for context, gained prominence in 1992 after the Rodney King riots as a way to connect police and community leaders in order to ostensibly combat gang violence70; they made cohesive the militarization tactics (weed) and community policing tactics (seed) employed in counter-insurgency efforts.71 In December 2014, the FBI gave Pillsbury United Communities its “Director’s Community Leadership Award”, an annual award given to groups for crime prevention efforts.72 Then-president and chief executive, Chanda Smith Baker, accepted the award. Coincidentally, Chanda Smith Baker—now working for the Minneapolis Foundation—also sits on the Minnesota Department of Public Safety’s newspeak titled “Working Group on Police-Involved Deadly Force Encounters”. The goal of the working group was to “identify ways to reduce deadly force encounters with law enforcement”73. Members of the group included the Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo, the Minnesota Attorney General, Philando Castile’s (killed by police in Minnesota in 2016) uncle, and other judge’s, academics, politicians, and NGO managers. Tragically and ironically, the working group released its findings in February 2020; that George Floyd was murdered, just a few months later in a “police-involved deadly force encounter”, demonstrates the extent to which so-called community policing is useful to the community.
One final interesting link between NGOs and the police in Minneapolis: as mentioned earlier, Chanda Smith Baker, after working for Pillsbury United Communities, went on to work as the Senior Vice President, Impact for The Minneapolis Foundation. The current president and CEO of the Minneapolis Foundation is R.T. Rybak, who was also the former mayor of Minneapolis. R.T. Rybak also sits on the board of a company called Benchmark Analytics: an IT company which has designed a system capable of predicting when officers will become problematically violent. Rybak therefore has a direct material interest in “reforming” the police. In an article written on June 2, titled “I Was the Mayor of Minneapolis and I Know Our Cops Have a Problem”, Rybak recalls surveying the damage to Minneapolis after the riots with Chanda Smith Baker, before advertising his firm’s solution to police violence.74 Unsurprisingly he emphasizes the humanity of the police, and he sees the solution as being community policing informed by predicative behavior technology.
The organizational and interpersonal links between NGO managers, politicians, police leadership, “community leaders”, and the board members of large capitalist firms points to the existence of a ruling capitalist class. The above is just a small illustration of how the ruling class rules in Minneapolis.
To summarize all of this: Pillsbury United Communities is an established, well-respected local NGO. It is part of the non-profit industrial complex, relying on philanthropic intermediaries for much of its funding, which in turn are funded by massive corporations. It came out very vocally in the early stages of the George Floyd Uprising, urging a more liberal and institutional approach to activism as opposed to the riots. And, it has close ties to the Minneapolis Police Department and state police through community policing programs. It is just one textbook example of many of how NGOs act as elements of a counter-insurgency strategy.
The Democrats
The Democrats have been referred to as the “graveyard of social movements” insofar as they absorb, coopt, and disorganize them.75 Their approach to the George Floyd Uprising is no different. What the Democratic Party sought to do in the wake of the George Floyd Uprising was a combination of repression (in those places in which it exercised power, such as Minneapolis, New York, L.A., etc.) and coopt its energies into the Biden 2020 campaign. Given the unpopularity of Biden and the overall increasing disinterest in electoral politics by much of the left the attempt to coopt the movement, at least ostensibly, has been unsuccessful. It is, however, still worth examining in order to paint a full picture of the counter-insurgency campaign against the uprising.
At the beginning of the uprising, the Democratic Party machine jumped into motion but was unsure how to act. While top Democrat strategists spoke to media about how the uprising could affect the election76 (indicating that they were in fact working on a response), there was little in the way of official high-level statement or actions for almost a week. Then on June 2 two fairly major events occurred. First, Biden publicly brought Julian Castro into his campaign; Castro had been a vocal proponent of liberal police reforms during his bid to become the Democratic nominee for president.77 Second, Pelosi, the multi-millionaire Speaker of the House, asked the Congressional Black Caucus to draft a series of police reforms.78
On June 8, following a ridiculous display in which Pelosi and other top Democrats took a knee wearing Ghanaian kente cloths, the Justice in Policing Act was revealed. The act is fairly milquetoast—far behind the nebulous demands of the uprising—and includes provisions for more easily prosecuting police in cases of brutality, mandatory body cameras, as well as a ban on chokeholds. The Act does absolutely nothing to abolish or even defund police departments. 79 Nor is the act likely to become law; even if the act was to pass the Republican-majority Senate, Trump has announced his attention to veto it.80
Rather than an accident, the unlikelihood of the bill passing is a feature, one of the ways in which so-called “checks and balances” help protect the current order. The Democrats know this; had it been likely to pass the bill would have been even more muted. The inaction of the Democrats in the face of the George Floyd Uprising is not surprising; they are one of the two parties that have overseen the construction and maintenance of the white-supremacist order in the United States. Biden is himself a career segregationist and author of a 1994 crime bill81 which was a cornerstone in the construction of the modern for-profit prison behemoth.82 The Congressional Black Caucus has itself helped to make the police a “protected class”, and also contributed to the militarization of police through the 1033 program.83
Despite the lack of success of the official Democrat cooptation attempt of the George Floyd Uprising, I want to point out one of the more insidious ways that the Democrats are attempting to coopt outrage against police murders through social movements themselves. It is worth first pointing out that Alicia Garza, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, is a supporter of the centrist-wing of the Democrats, specifically Elizabeth Warren.84 Black Lives Matter has recently launched a campaign called #WhatMatters2020. The goal of the campaign is to bring “BLM supporters and allies to the polls in the 2020 U.S Presidential Election to build collective power and ensure candidates are held accountable for the issues that systematically and disproportionately impact Black and under-served communities across the nation.”85 A campaign video calls on people to vote for an America where “police are held accountable” and “where we have access to quality healthcare”. The problem with this campaign, of course, is that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are even pretending to deliver on promises like this. Biden does not support medicare for all, and was an architect of the current racist criminal justice system. The #WhatMatters2020 campaign is a cynical sheepdog campaign, bringing black people angry at the current injustices of American white-supremacist capitalism back into the Democrats.
Invasion of the Liberals
Earlier in this article, I mentioned that the media was attempting to call into existence a group of “good”, peaceful protestors. I want to spend more time now talking about this process. Ideology is both produced by practice, but also exists as a way of calling particular types of people into activity.86 When the media began focusing almost exclusively on “good” protestors, it was at first inventing this category out of almost thin air; the line it was drawing was an artificial one. But by putting forward this ideological pole, the media called into action people who had hitherto not been involved. The media, alongside notable liberal politicians and other establishment figures, created a group of liberal protestors out of inactive liberals who now saw themselves and their own political predilections reflected in the ongoing uprising. Included in these efforts by the media and liberal establishment figures is a now-famous essay by former president Barrack Obama, posted to Medium on June 1, in which he said he supported the protests, condemned violence, and urged reform efforts to be focused on institutional channels.87
The flip side of the liberal “call to action” is that it also acts as a safeguard against radicalization. When reality confronts ideology, it is often ideology that is changed. Reality forces a rupture in one’s worldview which can lead to radicalization. In this case it became difficult to substantiate the story of a good, neutral, and protective state in the face of ubiquitous police violence against even peaceful protestors. If reality can be changed or if powerful narratives can reinforce ideology, ideology is cemented rather than discarded. In this case, liberalism as a worldview was able to escape challenge due to the emergence of establishment liberals in support of the protests.
The result of the liberalization of the protests on public opinion is interesting. By mid-June, 67% of Americans reportedly supported the ongoing protests. The racial breakdown was more stark: 60% of white people supported the protests, whereas 86% of black people supported them. Despite this, 59% of Americans (including 62% of white Americans compared with 43% of black Americans) believed that the protests were spurred on at least in part as a means for people to engage in criminal behavior.88 Thus the liberalization of the protests resulted in a situation in which the majority of a country deeply enmeshed in white supremacy supported protests proclaiming the value of black lives, despite the majority of the country materially benefitting from that same unjust racial hierarchy. That major politicians like Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and former Governor of Massachusetts and presidential candidate Mitt Romney joined the protests—both politicians with significant power to change the conditions against which they protested- signals only that the political message of the uprising had shifted in the popular consciousness away from “dismantle white supremacy” to the base level of “black people are human”. That nearly one third of America could not even support such a basic affirmation of humanity is telling.
The liberal invasion had three main effects on the uprising. First, the influx of liberals into the rallies not only led to the proliferation of protests and an increase in attendance, but also to their pacification. Protestors began to self-police, modifying their tactics in line with the interests of the existing order. Protestors made sure to demarcate themselves and their actions as “peaceful”, thus robbing themselves of even the specter of militancy. To a certain extent there is a degree of “selection bias” here; militant protestors are more likely to be arrested, and therefore over time the composition of a protest will naturally become more liberal. Police are aware of this and consciously seek to tie up activist time and resources in legal proceedings.
Internally to the protests, liberal protestors acted like “peace police”, disrupting the activities of militants. Examples included liberals in Washington DC turning over a “rioter” to the police (at an anti-police march!) at the end of May,89 as well as the doxxing by liberal activists of Rayshard Brook’s girlfriend, pegged as an outside agitator.90 She is accused of setting fire to the Wendy’s outside of which her partner was murdered by police. Another high-profile example of the liberalization of the protests on the tactical level is Al Sharpton’s call for a march on Washington in August, which took place at the height of militant protests occurring in Washington D.C..91 Such a call, not to support the existing protests but to postpone them, was a calculated attempt to de-escalate the uprising.
Second, the influx of liberals into the movement has paved the way for false victories. By this I mean superficial gains that ultimately leave the underlying power structure which gave rise to the protests unchallenged. Included here is the “Black Lives Matter” street mural in Washington D.C., various corporate black-washing campaigns, the changing of band names, and the cancelling of shows like COPS. One notes the irony of the mayor of New York ordering that “Black Lives Matter” be painted outside of Trump Towers while overseeing a police department which brutalizes black people and and while also opposing efforts to defund the NYPD.
Third, the influx of liberals into the movement had an effect on defanging the demands of the movement. Black Lives Matter was quick to issue the demand to defund the police in the early days of the George Floyd Uprising: they explicitly pushed for a defunding of the police, without going into detail as to what that would entail.92 Other activists seized on the space this opened up and stated that “defund” meant “defund everything”. They argued that the police were not reformable and therefore had to be abolished.93 What followed was a discussion in the media about whether or not “defund” actually meant “defund”. There was no shortage of liberals assuring other concerned liberals that defunding didn’t actually mean that there would be no police.94 While Minneapolis has since begun steps to disband their police force, demands in other locations seem to ask for a portion of police budgets to be re-allocated to community resources, in line with the Movement for Black Lives policy demands.95
The conceptual slippage of “defund” has not gone unnoticed by the police themselves. In a June 18 article on Police One, Mike Walker, a police officer for 27 years, wrote that “defunding is really just a way of saying reduced funding.”96 In the same article he offers assurance to worried police officers by noting that budget cuts were already on the agenda due to COVID-19, and that most municipalities legally cannot function without police due to their municipal charters.
That at least some police are fine with temporarily defunding the police speaks to the heart of just how defanged a demand “defund the police” actually is. But “abolish the police” as a slogan absent a critique of the conditions that give rise to the police is itself a demand that does not cut to the heart of the matter. The police exist because capitalism requires force to defend inequality and exploitation. Without ending exploitation, there will still need to be some form of coercive apparatus to ensure the continued existence of exploitation. Thus the coercive functions of the police will be offloaded to other state apparatuses; there will still be violent, racist coercion whether or not the police exist. This is something that already happens; consider, for instance, the racist terror that child welfare services across Canada (not armed, not police) put Indigenous people through for years. The George Floyd Uprising opened the space for discussions about the fundamental nature of society, about capitalism, imperialism, and racial inequality in America. Liberals shifted the overton window to exclude visions of radical transformation, instead focusing on the degree to which police should be defunded. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s now viral Instagram post which stated that police abolition looks like white suburbia, an atomized capitalist dystopia, makes total sense in this context.97
The liberal invasion resulted in a defanging of protest tactics, results, and even the demands themselves. This process, which was aided by the police, the media, and “legitimate” community leaders, was nothing less than the political side of a counter-insurgency campaign by the American ruling class directed against the George Floyd Uprising. Thus a movement which began with the burning of a police station has been transformed into one of requesting minor amendments to municipal budgets.
…And the Stick
The majority of the article has focused on the less-obvious methods that the American ruling class has used in its counter-insurgency efforts against the George Floyd Uprising. However, while counter-insurgency is more effective if it involves elements of soft power, no counter-insurgency effort is complete without open repression. The efforts against the George Floyd Uprising are no exception.
It is hard to overstate the scale of the police operation against protestors over the past month. For instance, by June 2 there already been over 11 000 arrests of protestors.98 The volume of arrests was used as an excuse to temporarily suspend habeus corpus in New York.99 There have been numerous documented arrests and attacks on journalists from even liberal platforms such as CNN. To my knowledge there are no up to date figures on the total number of arrests. In terms of the intensity of the police response, over the past month there have been countless scenes of police using tear gas and pepper spray to clear otherwise peaceful protests. An online database has logged over 670 individual incidents of police brutality caught on video.100 Police have killed at least four protestors over the course of the uprising. Many more have been maimed.101 As a result there are at least 40 different lawsuits currently underway against police departments for brutality during the George Floyd Uprising.102
As if the level of direct repression was not enough, there has also been an increase in surveillance of activists. A recent leak, titled “Blue Leaks”, has revealed that the FBI monitored social media extensively during the protests and forward information it thought relevant to local police departments.103 FBI agents have also harassed activists after they attended recent protests against police brutality.104 The goal of FBI harassment in general is to intimidate protestors and organizers into inactivity as a means of disorganizing movements. These most recent incidents are reminiscent of FBI surveillance and intimidation of the anti-war movement and COINTELPRO.
The extraordinary level of police terror was not enough to contain the uprising. The National Guard was deployed to 31 states and Washington D.C.. This involved over 62 000 soldiers.105 The National Guard was itself involved in the violent repression of the protests.106 Over 200 cities imposed a curfew, which affected more than 60 million people.107 Trump went as far as to threaten to use the American military to impose order on cities where the protests could not be contained by conventional repression.108
One final aspect to overt repression of protests which needs to be included is the role of far right organizations and militia groups. While these are ostensibly distinct from the state, there is significant overlap and cooperation between police forces and far right organizations; a now infamous 2006 FBI report details the extent to which white supremacists have infiltrated police departments.109 For instance, in early June police in Oregon were caught on video coordinating with the far-right Proud Boys to help them avoid arrest after they intimidated George Floyd protestors.110 Much has also been written about the so-called Boogaloo Movement, which has targeted anti-police brutality protests.111
There have been many attacks by the far right on recent protests. Incidents include a mob of armed counter-protestors in Bethel, Ohio which attacked a black lives matter rally searching for “antifa”.112 The KKK has also been active in these efforts: they attacked a black lives matter rally in Nevada,113 and a local KKK leader in Virginia drove his car into a protest in mid-June.114 The autonomous zone set up in Seattle has also been a magnet for far-right attacks; on June 15 the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer entered the zone and beat a man,115 and there have been five shootings directed at the zone in recent weeks, somehow allowed by police. The most recent one resulted in the death of two attackers and injuries to a 14 year old boy.116 Far right groups have also announced a plan to “retake” the zone on July 4.117
Police and national guard brutality, police harassment and surveillance, threats of military intervention, and attacks by the far right all serve as the coercive elements to the American establishment’s counter-insurgency efforts against the George Floyd Uprising. Without the threat of violence the “carrot” side of the “carrot and stick” formula would not be as attractive. The end goal however, is the same: the maintenance and defense of an order defined by exploitation and white supremacy.
Conclusion
Over the course of this article what I have sought to do is outline some of the ways that the American ruling sought to defend itself during the course of one of the largest threats to its own existence in recent years. I have shown how combined and coordinated efforts by: police forces, the military, capitalist media, NGOs, the Democrats, far-right groups, and liberal establishment figures have all combined to undermine the George Floyd Uprising. Thus far these efforts seem to have been rather successful.
The beautiful thing about history, however, is that it is never predetermined. The future is not written. While the establishment has a mind-boggling array of resources and sophisticated counter-insurgency techniques at its disposal, it is not infallible. Indeed, it does (and has!) made mistakes. It is these mistakes that provide openings for revolutionary forces to intervene and change the existing social order. Even the outcome of these protests is not yet decided: they continue, and the protestors become increasingly sophisticated in fighting back. The massive uprising of the past few weeks has shown the degree to which the people do possess power. But the events have also shown the pitfalls into which movements of resistance can fall. By writing this article I hope to have exposed some of these pitfalls, so that liberation struggles now and in the future can avoid them.
Notes
- ↩ VOA News, “Minnesota Calls National Guard to Quell Violent Protests in Minneapolis”.
- ↩ Kandist Mallett, “The Black Lives Matter Revolution Can’t Be Co-Opted By Police and Lawmakers”.
- ↩ Kristian Williams, “The other side of the COIN: counterinsurgency and community policing,” Interface, Vol 3, No 1, May 2011.
- ↩ Aaron Morrison and Tim Sullivan, “Minneapolis overwhelmed again by protests over Floyd death,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, May 30, 2020.
- ↩ Reid Forgrave, “On patrol in St. Paul, National Guard waits ‘for the scales to tip’”, Minneapolis Star Tribune, June 2, 2020.
- ↩ Jamie Ehrlich, “The hidden history of the secret presidential bunker,” CNN Politics.
- ↩ Hilary Hanson, “NYC Transit Union Backs Bus Drivers Who Refuse To Transport Protestors For NYPD”. HuffPost U.S., May 30, 2020.
- ↩ Joe DeManuelle-Hall, “West Coast Dockers Stop Work to Honor George Floyd”. Labor Notes, June 11, 2020.
- ↩ Matthew Impelli, “54 Percent of Americans Think Burning Down Minneapolis Police Precinct Was Justified After George Floyd’s Death,” Newsweek, June 6, 2020.
- ↩ Joint Publication 3-24: Counterinsurgency, GL-5.
- ↩ Joint Publication 3-24: Counterinsurgency, xiii.
- ↩ Joint Publication 3-24: Counterinsurgency, I-7.
- ↩ Joint Publication 3-24: Counterinsurgency, I-8.
- ↩ Joint Publication 3-24: Counterinsurgency, III-6.
- ↩ Joint Publication 3-24: Counterinsurgency, III-14.
- ↩ Feinberg, M., Willer, R., & Kovacheff, C. (2020). “The activist’s dilemma: Extreme protest actions reduce popular support for social movements”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Advance online publication.
- ↩ Joint Publication 3-24: Counterinsurgency, III-5.
- ↩ Connor Woodman, “The Imperial Boomerang: How colonial methods of repression migrate back to the metropolis”.
- ↩ Kristian Williams, “The other side of the COIN: counterinsurgency and community policing,” Interface, Vol 3, No 1, May 2011.
- ↩ Williams, “The other side of the COIN: counterinsurgency and community policing”.
- ↩ Kavita Kumar and Miguel Otarola, “Small-business owners pick up the pieces after night of rage, destruction”, Minneapolis Star Tribune, May 28, 2020.
- ↩ Paul Walsh, “Seeing his city on fire would ‘devastate’ George Floyd, girlfriend says”, Minneapolis Star Tribune, May 28, 2020.
- ↩ Briana Bierschbach, “Minnesota’s political, faith, community leaders plead for an end to riots”, Minneapolis Star Tribune, May 30, 2020.
- ↩ John Ewoldt, “Minneapolis neighborhoods face food desert after looting closes multiple stores”, Minneapolis Star Tribune, June 2, 2020.
- ↩ Kavita Kumar and Adam Belz, “In riot-hit Twin Cities neighborhoods, a hole where pharmacies used to be”, Minneapolis Star Tribune, June 2, 2020.
- ↩ Jim Buchta, “Minneapolis vandalism targets include 189-unit affordable housing development.” Minneapolis Star Tribune, May 28, 2020.
- ↩ Kathleen Hennessy and Tim Sullivan, “Unrest devastates a city’s landmark street of diversity.” Minneapolis Star Tribune. May 31, 2020.
- ↩ Briana Bierschbach, “Minnesota’s political, faith, community leaders plead for an end to riots”, Minneapolis Star Tribune, May 30, 2020.
- ↩ Andy Mannix, “’We came to riot’: Illinois man livestreamed lighting fires, handing out explosives in Minneapolis, charges say”. Minneapolis Star Tribune, June 1, 2020.
- ↩ Torey Van Oot. “’Fog of conflict’: Minnesota officials responding to George Floyd protests, violence helped spread of misinformation”. Minneapolis Star Tribune, June 6, 2020.
- ↩ Kelly Smith, “Minneapolis, St. Paul foundations aim at rebuilding, criminal justice reform after riots.”. Minneapolis Star Tribune, June 5, 2020; “How To Give Back To Your Besieged Community”. CBS Minnesota, June 9, 2020.
- ↩ Sam Levin. “Movement to defund police gains ‘unprecedented’ support across U.S..” The Guardian, June 4, 2020; Jack Kelly. “The Movement To Defund Or Disband Police: Here’s What You Need To Know Now.” Forbes, June 9, 2020.
- ↩ Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent. Michael Parenti, Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media.
- ↩ Britt Robson, “New owner Glen Taylor: less liberal Star Tribune ahead.” MinnPost, April 16, 2014.
- ↩ Chris Haynes. “Timberwolves owner Glen Taylor calls George Floyd’s death ‘a shame’ and ‘a tragedy’”. Yahoo Sports, May 28, 2020.
- ↩ Dan Grossi, “Public relations in law enforcement: Is the PIO obsolete?” Police One, January 8, 2020.
- ↩ W. Michael Phibbs, “Why your police department needs a brand.” Police One, September 7, 2017.
- ↩ John Ferrugia, Brittany Freeman, Jason Foster. “Denver police defend public relations spending”. The Denver Channel, February 17, 2016.
- ↩ William Turvill. “UK police forces spend more than £36m a year on PR and communications”. Press Gazette, May 1, 2015.
- ↩ Los Angeles Police Department. “Public Relations Unit”, Official Site of The Los Angeles Police Department.
- ↩ Mark Saunders, Chief of Police. “Toronto Police Service—2019 Operating Budget Request”.
- ↩ Jake Offenhartz, “NYPD Defends Its Massive Budget As Social Services And Youth Programs Are Cut”. The Gothamist, May 15, 2020.
- ↩ Joel Rub, David Zahniser. “L.A. police union hires PR firm in bid to win pay raises”. Los Angeles Times, January 10, 2015.
- ↩ POL Staff. “PR Firm Launches Service to Defend Police Officers from Anti-Cop Activists.” Police Magazine, November 17, 2015.
- ↩ John Guilfoil Public Relations. “Sectors We Serve”.
- ↩ PolicePR.
- ↩ Melissa Agnes. “Discussing the Divide Between Police and Their Communities, on The Police Podcast”. Melissa Agnes: Crisis Management Strategist. January 27, 2015; Melissa Agnes. “TCIP #011—Discussing The #Ferguson Crisis with Tim Burrows”. Melissa Agnes: Crisis Management Strategist. August 17, 2014.
- ↩ Julie Parker. “Hiding and Hoping Is Not a PR Strategy.” Police Chief Magazine.
- ↩ Darrel W. Stephens, Julia Hill, Sheldon Greenburg. Strategic Communication Practices: A Toolkit for Police Executives.
- ↩ Sean Whitcomb, Jonah Spangenthal-Lee. “3 reasons your agency should be on Reddit.” Police One, May 2, 2019.
- ↩ P1 Staff. “Roundtable: How to match your agency’s social media strategy with community needs”. Police One, May 2, 2019.
- ↩ Heather R. Cotter. “12 things every police department’s civil unrest plan needs”. Police One, May 28, 2020.
- ↩ “Are you ready for the crisis that may be heading your way?” Police One, July 5, 2018.
- ↩ Yael Bar-tur, Mathew Rejis, “Now do you recognize the power of social media?”. Police One, June 12, 2020.
- ↩ Andrea Smith, “Introduction”, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, 3.
- ↩ Malcolm X, “Message to the Grass Roots”. Black Past.
- ↩ Netfa Freeman, “Movement Ferguson, Beware the Nonprofit Industrial Complex”. Black Agenda Report, January 21, 2015.
- ↩ George Ciccariello-Maher, “Chronicle of a Riot Foretold”. Counterpunch, June 29, 2010.
- ↩ Advance the Struggle. “Justice for Oscar Grant: A Lost Opportunity?”. Advance the Struggle, July 15, 2009.
- ↩ Netfa Freeman, “Movement Ferguson, Beware the Nonprofit Industrial Complex”. Black Agenda Report, January 21, 2015.
- ↩ BOLD. “Board”. BOLD.
- ↩ Borealis Philanthropy. “Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity”.
- ↩ BOLD (Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity) Funding Page.
- ↩ “Let me be clear: we do not advocate violence in protests of any kind—not by any protester and not by police. We do not advocate or condone destruction of property. We believe in the value of human lives.” Reddit.
- ↩ Patrick Reusse. “Stephen Jackson, other activists score with straight talk at Minneapolis City Hall rotunda.” Minneapolis Star Tribune, May 30, 2020.
- ↩ Adair Mosley. “Justice for George Floyd”. Pillsbury United Communities, June 2, 2020.
- ↩ Greater Twin Cities United Way. “Corporate Partners” .
- ↩ Kari Paul. “How Target, Google, Bank of America and Microsoft quietly fund police through private donations”. The Guardian, June 18, 2020.
- ↩ Minneapolis Department of Health & Family Support. “City of Minneapolis Weed & Seed Initiative”.
- ↩ Community Capacity Development Office, U.S. Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs. Weed and Seed Implementation Manual.
- ↩ Kristian Williams, “The other side of the COIN: counterinsurgency and community policing,” Interface, Vol 3, No 1, May 2011.
- ↩ “FBI recognizes Pillsbury United Communities for its service to diverse neighborhoods.” Minneapolis Star Tribune, December 15, 2014.
- ↩ Working Group on Police-Involved Deadly Force Encounters. “Executive Summary of Recommendations”, 2.
- ↩ R. T. Rybak. “I Was the Mayor of Minneapolis and I Know Our Cops Have a Problem”. Benchmark Analytics, June 2, 2020.
- ↩ August H. Nimtz. “The Graveyard of Progressive Social Movements: The Black Hole of the Democratic Party”. MR Online, May 9, 2017.
- ↩ Brian Schwartz, “How Joe Biden’s leading VP contenders stack up in the wake of protests over George Floyd’s death”. CNBC, June 1, 2020; Daniel Strauss, “’A national crisis’: how the killing of George Floyd is changing U.S. politics”. The Guardian, May 30, 2020; Nicholas Fandos, “Congress Plans Hearings on Racial Violence and Use of Force by the Police”. New York Times, May 29, 2020.
- ↩ Suzanne Gamboa, “Joe Biden pulls Julian Castro into campaign, asks for help to ‘tackle police reform’”. NBC News, June 2, 2020.
- ↩ Kelsey Snell, Claudia Grisales. “Pelosi Asks Black Caucus To Come Up With Police Reforms Following Protests”. NPR, June 2, 2020.
- ↩ Catie Edmondson, “Democrats Unveil Sweeping Bill Targeting Police Misconduct and Racial Bias”, The New York Times, June 8, 2020.
- ↩ Lisa Mascaro, “Police overhaul dims, but House Democrats push ahead on vote”. Police One, June 25, 2020.
- ↩ German Lopez, “The controversial 1994 crime law that Joe Biden helped write, explained”. Vox, June 20, 2019.
- ↩ Glen Ford, “The Movement Gets BIG—and Its Enemies Reveal Themselves”. Black Agenda Report, June 4, 2020.
- ↩ Danny Haiphong, “The Rebellion Against Police Repression Must Guard Against ALL Enemies, Whether Red, Blue, or Green”, Black Agenda Report, June 17, 2020.
- ↩ Justine Coleman, “Warren endorsed by Black Lives Matter co-founder’s Black to the Future Action Fund”, The Hill, February 20, 2020.
- ↩ “BLM’s #WhatMatters2020”, Black Lives Matter.
- ↩ Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism.
- ↩ Barack Obama, “How to Make this Moment the Turning Point for Real Change”, June 1, 2020.
- ↩ Kim Parker, Juliana Menasce Horowitz, Monica Anderson. “Amid Protests, Majorities Across Racial and Ethnic Groups Express Support for the Black Lives Matter Movement”. Pew Research Center, June 12, 2020.
- ↩ TooFab Staff, “DC Protestors Drag Rioter Into Police Custody”. Too Fab, June 1, 2020.
- ↩ Vincent Barone, “Accused Wendy’s arsonist Natalie White was Rayshard Brooks’ ‘girlfriend’: lawyer”. New York Post, June 23, 2020.
- ↩ Lisa Hagen, “Al Sharpton Calls for Aug. 28 March on Washington at George Floyd Memorial”. U.S. News, June 4, 2020.
- ↩ “#DefundThePolice”. Black Lives Matter, May 30, 2020.
- ↩ Miarame Kaba, “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police.” The New York Times, June 12, 2020.
- ↩ Sean Boynton, “What does ‘defund the police’ really mean? Experts say confusion harming progress”. Global News, June 18, 2020; Amanda Arnold, “What Exactly Does It Mean to Defund the Police?”. The Cut, June 12, 2020; Andrew Ferguson, “‘Defund the Police’ Does Not Mean Defund the Police. Unless It Does.”. The Atlantic, June 14, 2020.
- ↩ “Invest-Divest”. Movement for Black Lives.
- ↩ Mike Walker, “The difference between police defunding and police disbanding”. Police One, June 18, 2020.
- ↩ Emily Dixon, “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Was Asked About Defunding the Police and Her Answer Went Viral”. Marie Claire, June 12, 2020.
- ↩ Scott Pham, “Police Arrested More Than 11,000 People At Protests Across The U.S.”. BuzzFeed News, June 2, 2020.
- ↩ Jan Ransom, “Despite Virus, Hundreds Arrested in Unrest Are Held in Cramped Jails”. The New York Times, June 4, 2020.
- ↩ Greg Doucette, George Floyd Protest Police Brutality Videos.
- ↩ “Violence and controversies during the George Floyd protests”. Wikipedia.
- ↩ Stephen Gandel, “At least 40 lawsuits claim police brutality at George Floyd protests across U.S.”. CBS News, June 23, 2020.
- ↩ Rainer Shea, “Intelligence leaks reveal just how ready the police state is to crack down on dissent.” June 25, 2020.
- ↩ Chris Brooks, “After Barr Ordered FBI to “Identify Criminal Organizers,” Activists Were Intimidated at Home and at Work”. The Intercept_, June 12, 2020.
- ↩ Katie Warren and Joey Hadden, “How all 50 states are responding to the George Floyd protests, from imposing curfews to calling in the National Guard”. Business Insider, June 4, 2020.
- ↩ Dylan Lovan, Bruce Schreiner. “Investigators: Man fatally shot on night of protests was killed by Kentucky National Guard rifle”. Military Times, June 9, 2020.
- ↩ Maria Sacchetti, “Curfews follow days of looting and demonstrations.” The Washington Post, June 1, 2020.
- ↩ Christina Wilkie, Amanda Macias. “Trump threatens to deploy military as George Floyd protests continue to shake the U.S.”. CNBC, June 1, 2020.
- ↩ FBI Counterterrorism Division. “(U) White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement”.
- ↩ Rachel E. Greenspan, “Oregon police told armed white men that they didn’t want to look like they were ‘playing favorites’ when they advised them to stay inside after curfew”. Insider, June 5, 2020.
- ↩ Craig Timberg, “As Trump warns of leftist violence, a dangerous threat emerges from the right-wing boogaloo movement”. The Washington Post, June 17, 2020.
- ↩ Rachel E. Greenspan, “Violent counter-protesters mobbed a small-town BLM demonstration in Ohio amid false rumors of antifa”. Insider, June 16, 2020.
- ↩ Lee Brown, “Men in Ku Klux Klan-style hoods crash Nevada Black Lives Matter rally”. New York Post, June 11, 2020.
- ↩ “KKK ‘leader’ charged for attack on Black Lives Matter protesters”. BBC News, June 9, 2020.
- ↩ Kelly Weill, “The Far Right Is Stirring Up Violence at Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone”. The Daily Beast, June 16, 2020.
- ↩ Konstantin Toropin, “Another shooting in Seattle’s police-free autonomous zone kills man and critically injures boy”. CNN, June 29, 2020.
- ↩ “‘American Patriots’ are planning to retake the so-called Seattle “autonomous zone” from CHAZ insurrectionists”. Law Enforcement Today, June 16, 2020.
Source: MROnline
#copaganda #CounterInsurgency #Ferguson #GeorgeFloyd #GeorgeFloydRebellion #GeorgeFloydUprising #insurgency #WhatMatters2020
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https://www.europesays.com/iran/71320/ Trumps Iran Claims Mirror Bush’s Iraq Mission Accomplished Textbook #Accomplished #Bush’s #claim #claims #compared #doubts #echoes #Iran #Iraq #Islam #Mirror #mission #moment #outcomes #over #raising #s #statements #Textbook #the #Times #to #trump #trumps #victory #wars
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RE: https://chaos.social/@sennoma/116309176431792649
If ever there was a textbook example of the correct usage of this word.
-
Blog Question Challenge: Technology Edition
It’s my turn to do the blog question challenge, technology edition! I’ve been tagged by James.
When Did You First Get Interested in Technology?
You have to understand that I consider “technology” as something “more than electricity, binary code, recording, or the Internet. It is the long pattern of humankind observing our surroundings and finding ways to adapt them…” — check out the whole textbook I wrote on this subject! 😁 Honestly, as a history nerd, I love exploring how humanity has adapted and reconceptualized our surroundings in all sorts of ways throughout the eons of our existence…
For me right now, these are the two answers that come to mind:
- I first started learning to read sheet music (a communication technology that’s been around in some fashion since at least the ancient Sumerians 4,000 years ago; or, in our more familiar western form starting in the late 1300s) when I was in third or fourth grade. My music reading was of course strengthened throughout my time singing in choirs starting in fourth grade, picking up my first violin in fifth grade and continuing to play to this day, teaching myself to play piano since I was a kid (whenever I came across one like at my grandparents’ house), playing handbells in church during my teen years… I wouldn’t trade this technology of music notation for anything; it’s been invaluable to me my whole life in helping me understand the nature of sound, acoustics, intervals, how different cultures interpret those sounds through their styles of notation, and how all of this intertwines…
- At the same time, my first video game console was a Commodore VIC-20 — I LOVED this machine and all the game cartridges I grew up playing on it!!! I must have started playing with it when I was maybe 6 years old… We plugged it into our family television in the living room and used a joystick from the Magnavox Odyssey 2. I can’t tell you the nostalgia I have when recalling the feeling of this in my hands! Some of my most favorite games included the text adventures of Scott Adams, Moon Patrol, Pole Position, Rat Hotel, and soooo many more!
What’s Your Favorite Piece of Technology All-Time?
I can’t choose just one, seriously…but here are my top two…
- Notation Software: Right now I’m using Dorico, and I LOVE it!! Best software for this purpose I’ve ever used, for sure! But, regardless of the evolving brands over the years, I started out writing my original music by hand, with pencil and paper, when I was 13. Being given my first notation software some years later (a pirated copy of Finale, haha) seriously changed everything! With this tech, I can copy/paste notations, hear a MIDI rendition of what I’m working on and make changes when needed, create professional looking sheet music that can not only be used by musicians but also sold online (believe me, printed music is ALWAYS preferable to handwritten parts…)… There’s just no comparison–but I will say that first learning your craft by hand is an extremely valuable experience that makes you just really appreciate the advanced tech even more.
- The ability to share music in various physical/digital storage formats: from vinyl to cassettes to CDs to mp3s and other file formats… I won’t say “streaming” however; while it is an impressive and [arguably] inevitable outgrowth of the Internet and the file-sharing craze of the ’90s, I truly believe we can do better for our artists and their fans than what we currently have with this streaming economy. BUT, the ability to store and shape and share music on various mediums is astounding! I’m one of those artists that would prefer to hone and craft and record my work in order to share it around, rather than play it live and have it disappear… So the fact that I can do that, is just thrilling for me!
What’s Your Favorite Piece Of Technology Right Now?
In no particular order…
The mid-century mechanical pegs on my acoustic violin: So my violin is more than 100 years old, but at some point in the mid-1900s, some previous owner had swapped out the normal friction pegs for mechanical pegs (they could have originally been banjo or mandolin pegs…?). I have to carry a screwdriver in my violin case for the rare occasion if a screw loosens and therefore a string starts falling flat, but otherwise these work fantastically well! My strings generally stay in tune even in adverse weather; plus the appearance gives my fiddle a really unique character! 🙂
My music recording set-up: My DAW (Logic Pro), my notation software (Dorico), my microphones, my audio interface (EVO 8), even a way cool iPad app called Audio Kit Synth One that creates fabulous digital synth presets… everything I need to make my music come to life and be able to be shared far and wide!
My 6-string electric violin: What else can I say–I adore her! She’s a Dragonfly model from the Electric Violin Lutherie in New York. The sixth string allows me to play almost to the bottom of a cello’s range… 🙂 You can hear a fabulous example of what she’s capable of on this EP…
Name One New Cool Piece Of Technology We’ll Have in 25 Years!
I mentioned this a bit earlier in this post, but I’m really hoping we find a better system for sharing music that is more freeing for both artists and listeners, where we all can enjoy and share various kinds of niche art for art’s sake, without needing to cater to the billionaire mega-corporations that have always held sway over what gets heard and what is even allowed to make any kind of money (e.g., Spotify’s decision not to pay any track that gets less than 1,000 streams in a year, which affects over half the songs on the platform). Maybe we’ll find an answer in adapted blockchain tech?… Maybe we’ll go back to favoring the collection of physical media? Maybe something blending the two ideas…? I don’t know… But that’s my hope.
Final Thoughts…
I am always and forever blown away that some of humanity’s biggest technological inventions came at first to enhance our ability to make music and art [take the wind-wheel for example: it was first put to use by Heron of Alexandria to power his own hydraulis–which, originally created in the 3rd century BCE by Ctesibius of Alexandria, was the world’s first keyboard instrument and the direct ancestor of the pipe organ; and the world’s first programmable machine was a “robotic flute player” invented by the Banu Musa Brothers in Baghdad in the 9th century (CE).]!!
Get this: The earliest evidence for textiles and sewing needles dates back to 30,000 and 61,000 years ago respectively. The oldest bone flute discovered dates back to at least 60,000-40,000 years ago, depending on who you ask. Basically music-making with complex instruments is at least as old as the beginning of making clothes. 😉
Who Will Participate Next?
I challenge Adam to complete the challenge! Tag, you’re it. 🙂
#commodore #electricViolin #musicHistory #musicNotation #musicTechnology #retroVideoGames #technology #vic20 #violin
-
Blog Question Challenge: Technology Edition
It’s my turn to do the blog question challenge, technology edition! I’ve been tagged by James.
When Did You First Get Interested in Technology?
You have to understand that I consider “technology” as something “more than electricity, binary code, recording, or the Internet. It is the long pattern of humankind observing our surroundings and finding ways to adapt them…” — check out the whole textbook I wrote on this subject! 😁 Honestly, as a history nerd, I love exploring how humanity has adapted and reconceptualized our surroundings in all sorts of ways throughout the eons of our existence…
For me right now, these are the two answers that come to mind:
- I first started learning to read sheet music (a communication technology that’s been around in some fashion since at least the ancient Sumerians 4,000 years ago; or, in our more familiar western form starting in the late 1300s) when I was in third or fourth grade. My music reading was of course strengthened throughout my time singing in choirs starting in fourth grade, picking up my first violin in fifth grade and continuing to play to this day, teaching myself to play piano since I was a kid (whenever I came across one like at my grandparents’ house), playing handbells in church during my teen years… I wouldn’t trade this technology of music notation for anything; it’s been invaluable to me my whole life in helping me understand the nature of sound, acoustics, intervals, how different cultures interpret those sounds through their styles of notation, and how all of this intertwines…
- At the same time, my first video game console was a Commodore VIC-20 — I LOVED this machine and all the game cartridges I grew up playing on it!!! I must have started playing with it when I was maybe 6 years old… We plugged it into our family television in the living room and used a joystick from the Magnavox Odyssey 2. I can’t tell you the nostalgia I have when recalling the feeling of this in my hands! Some of my most favorite games included the text adventures of Scott Adams, Moon Patrol, Pole Position, Rat Hotel, and soooo many more!
What’s Your Favorite Piece of Technology All-Time?
I can’t choose just one, seriously…but here are my top two…
- Notation Software: Right now I’m using Dorico, and I LOVE it!! Best software for this purpose I’ve ever used, for sure! But, regardless of the evolving brands over the years, I started out writing my original music by hand, with pencil and paper, when I was 13. Being given my first notation software some years later (a pirated copy of Finale, haha) seriously changed everything! With this tech, I can copy/paste notations, hear a MIDI rendition of what I’m working on and make changes when needed, create professional looking sheet music that can not only be used by musicians but also sold online (believe me, printed music is ALWAYS preferable to handwritten parts…)… There’s just no comparison–but I will say that first learning your craft by hand is an extremely valuable experience that makes you just really appreciate the advanced tech even more.
- The ability to share music in various physical/digital storage formats: from vinyl to cassettes to CDs to mp3s and other file formats… I won’t say “streaming” however; while it is an impressive and [arguably] inevitable outgrowth of the Internet and the file-sharing craze of the ’90s, I truly believe we can do better for our artists and their fans than what we currently have with this streaming economy. BUT, the ability to store and shape and share music on various mediums is astounding! I’m one of those artists that would prefer to hone and craft and record my work in order to share it around, rather than play it live and have it disappear… So the fact that I can do that, is just thrilling for me!
What’s Your Favorite Piece Of Technology Right Now?
In no particular order…
The mid-century mechanical pegs on my acoustic violin: So my violin is more than 100 years old, but at some point in the mid-1900s, some previous owner had swapped out the normal friction pegs for mechanical pegs (they could have originally been banjo or mandolin pegs…?). I have to carry a screwdriver in my violin case for the rare occasion if a screw loosens and therefore a string starts falling flat, but otherwise these work fantastically well! My strings generally stay in tune even in adverse weather; plus the appearance gives my fiddle a really unique character! 🙂
My music recording set-up: My DAW (Logic Pro), my notation software (Dorico), my microphones, my audio interface (EVO 8), even a way cool iPad app called Audio Kit Synth One that creates fabulous digital synth presets… everything I need to make my music come to life and be able to be shared far and wide!
My 6-string electric violin: What else can I say–I adore her! She’s a Dragonfly model from the Electric Violin Lutherie in New York. The sixth string allows me to play almost to the bottom of a cello’s range… 🙂 You can hear a fabulous example of what she’s capable of on this EP…
Name One New Cool Piece Of Technology We’ll Have in 25 Years!
I mentioned this a bit earlier in this post, but I’m really hoping we find a better system for sharing music that is more freeing for both artists and listeners, where we all can enjoy and share various kinds of niche art for art’s sake, without needing to cater to the billionaire mega-corporations that have always held sway over what gets heard and what is even allowed to make any kind of money (e.g., Spotify’s decision not to pay any track that gets less than 1,000 streams in a year, which affects over half the songs on the platform). Maybe we’ll find an answer in adapted blockchain tech?… Maybe we’ll go back to favoring the collection of physical media? Maybe something blending the two ideas…? I don’t know… But that’s my hope.
Final Thoughts…
I am always and forever blown away that some of humanity’s biggest technological inventions came at first to enhance our ability to make music and art [take the wind-wheel for example: it was first put to use by Heron of Alexandria to power his own hydraulis–which, originally created in the 3rd century BCE by Ctesibius of Alexandria, was the world’s first keyboard instrument and the direct ancestor of the pipe organ; and the world’s first programmable machine was a “robotic flute player” invented by the Banu Musa Brothers in Baghdad in the 9th century (CE).]!!
Get this: The earliest evidence for textiles and sewing needles dates back to 30,000 and 61,000 years ago respectively. The oldest bone flute discovered dates back to at least 60,000-40,000 years ago, depending on who you ask. Basically music-making with complex instruments is at least as old as the beginning of making clothes. 😉
Who Will Participate Next?
I challenge Adam to complete the challenge! Tag, you’re it. 🙂
#commodore #electricViolin #musicHistory #musicNotation #musicTechnology #retroVideoGames #technology #vic20 #violin
-
Blog Question Challenge: Technology Edition
It’s my turn to do the blog question challenge, technology edition! I’ve been tagged by James.
When Did You First Get Interested in Technology?
You have to understand that I consider “technology” as something “more than electricity, binary code, recording, or the Internet. It is the long pattern of humankind observing our surroundings and finding ways to adapt them…” — check out the whole textbook I wrote on this subject! 😁 Honestly, as a history nerd, I love exploring how humanity has adapted and reconceptualized our surroundings in all sorts of ways throughout the eons of our existence…
For me right now, these are the two answers that come to mind:
- I first started learning to read sheet music (a communication technology that’s been around in some fashion since at least the ancient Sumerians 4,000 years ago; or, in our more familiar western form starting in the late 1300s) when I was in third or fourth grade. My music reading was of course strengthened throughout my time singing in choirs starting in fourth grade, picking up my first violin in fifth grade and continuing to play to this day, teaching myself to play piano since I was a kid (whenever I came across one like at my grandparents’ house), playing handbells in church during my teen years… I wouldn’t trade this technology of music notation for anything; it’s been invaluable to me my whole life in helping me understand the nature of sound, acoustics, intervals, how different cultures interpret those sounds through their styles of notation, and how all of this intertwines…
- At the same time, my first video game console was a Commodore VIC-20 — I LOVED this machine and all the game cartridges I grew up playing on it!!! I must have started playing with it when I was maybe 6 years old… We plugged it into our family television in the living room and used a joystick from the Magnavox Odyssey 2. I can’t tell you the nostalgia I have when recalling the feeling of this in my hands! Some of my most favorite games included the text adventures of Scott Adams, Moon Patrol, Pole Position, Rat Hotel, and soooo many more!
What’s Your Favorite Piece of Technology All-Time?
I can’t choose just one, seriously…but here are my top two…
- Notation Software: Right now I’m using Dorico, and I LOVE it!! Best software for this purpose I’ve ever used, for sure! But, regardless of the evolving brands over the years, I started out writing my original music by hand, with pencil and paper, when I was 13. Being given my first notation software some years later (a pirated copy of Finale, haha) seriously changed everything! With this tech, I can copy/paste notations, hear a MIDI rendition of what I’m working on and make changes when needed, create professional looking sheet music that can not only be used by musicians but also sold online (believe me, printed music is ALWAYS preferable to handwritten parts…)… There’s just no comparison–but I will say that first learning your craft by hand is an extremely valuable experience that makes you just really appreciate the advanced tech even more.
- The ability to share music in various physical/digital storage formats: from vinyl to cassettes to CDs to mp3s and other file formats… I won’t say “streaming” however; while it is an impressive and [arguably] inevitable outgrowth of the Internet and the file-sharing craze of the ’90s, I truly believe we can do better for our artists and their fans than what we currently have with this streaming economy. BUT, the ability to store and shape and share music on various mediums is astounding! I’m one of those artists that would prefer to hone and craft and record my work in order to share it around, rather than play it live and have it disappear… So the fact that I can do that, is just thrilling for me!
What’s Your Favorite Piece Of Technology Right Now?
In no particular order…
The mid-century mechanical pegs on my acoustic violin: So my violin is more than 100 years old, but at some point in the mid-1900s, some previous owner had swapped out the normal friction pegs for mechanical pegs (they could have originally been banjo or mandolin pegs…?). I have to carry a screwdriver in my violin case for the rare occasion if a screw loosens and therefore a string starts falling flat, but otherwise these work fantastically well! My strings generally stay in tune even in adverse weather; plus the appearance gives my fiddle a really unique character! 🙂
My music recording set-up: My DAW (Logic Pro), my notation software (Dorico), my microphones, my audio interface (EVO 8), even a way cool iPad app called Audio Kit Synth One that creates fabulous digital synth presets… everything I need to make my music come to life and be able to be shared far and wide!
My 6-string electric violin: What else can I say–I adore her! She’s a Dragonfly model from the Electric Violin Lutherie in New York. The sixth string allows me to play almost to the bottom of a cello’s range… 🙂 You can hear a fabulous example of what she’s capable of on this EP…
Name One New Cool Piece Of Technology We’ll Have in 25 Years!
I mentioned this a bit earlier in this post, but I’m really hoping we find a better system for sharing music that is more freeing for both artists and listeners, where we all can enjoy and share various kinds of niche art for art’s sake, without needing to cater to the billionaire mega-corporations that have always held sway over what gets heard and what is even allowed to make any kind of money (e.g., Spotify’s decision not to pay any track that gets less than 1,000 streams in a year, which affects over half the songs on the platform). Maybe we’ll find an answer in adapted blockchain tech?… Maybe we’ll go back to favoring the collection of physical media? Maybe something blending the two ideas…? I don’t know… But that’s my hope.
Final Thoughts…
I am always and forever blown away that some of humanity’s biggest technological inventions came at first to enhance our ability to make music and art [take the wind-wheel for example: it was first put to use by Heron of Alexandria to power his own hydraulis–which, originally created in the 3rd century BCE by Ctesibius of Alexandria, was the world’s first keyboard instrument and the direct ancestor of the pipe organ; and the world’s first programmable machine was a “robotic flute player” invented by the Banu Musa Brothers in Baghdad in the 9th century (CE).]!!
Get this: The earliest evidence for textiles and sewing needles dates back to 30,000 and 61,000 years ago respectively. The oldest bone flute discovered dates back to at least 60,000-40,000 years ago, depending on who you ask. Basically music-making with complex instruments is at least as old as the beginning of making clothes. 😉
Who Will Participate Next?
I challenge Adam to complete the challenge! Tag, you’re it. 🙂
#commodore #electricViolin #musicHistory #musicNotation #musicTechnology #retroVideoGames #technology #vic20 #violin
-
🤯 Behold! A "90-minute guide" to modern #microprocessors that's longer than most people's #attention spans. It's a PhD appendix masquerading as a literary masterpiece, revered by university courses because apparently, they ran out of actual textbooks 📚. Silicon Valley #startups love it—proof that even #tech billionaires can be duped by anything with a million clicks! 🙃
https://www.lighterra.com/articles/ #guide #span #education #SiliconValley #HackerNews #ngated -
re: Good's murder - They've stopped the state from investigating. They've stopped the Department of Justice from investigating. Only the FBI is investigating; DHS says officer is immune.
Textbook fascism, we need to prosecute every single crime these brownshirts commit, no matter how many years later.
Document everything. Get free representation, press charges. Stay vigilant.
#fascist #USA #ImpeachNoem #impeach #remove #prosecute #jail #OurPutin #AnotherOrban #GOP #ICE
https://www.ms.now/news/doj-civil-rights-division-officials-quit-harmeet-dhillon -
Authors: Susan L. Verhulst; David A. DeCenzo Publisher: Wiley Format: PDF Print ISBN: 9781394243723, 1394243723 eText ISBN: 9781394243693, 1394243693 Edition: 15th Copyright: 2024
Read more 👉 https://lttr.ai/AaybF
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Fundamentals of Human Resource Management, 15th Edition – PDF eBook
Download it now!
978-1394243730, 9781394243730, 978-1394243723, 978-1394243693
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HKU students had some fun hands-on learning experiences in the HKU CommonCore course, CCHU9080 Dead People’s Things: Excavating the Past with Archaeology.
In the lecture “The Birth of an Artefact: The Economics of Things,” our students explored the meaning and value of producing everyday objects, in creative ways. On 25 March 2026, everyone crafted unique artefacts with #play-doh, turning abstract theories into tangible, personal creations.
Learning comes alive when we create, experiment, and think outside the textbook.
Details of the course: https://commoncore.hku.hk/cchu9080
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Ah yes, because we all have *loads* of spare time to ponder six and a half reasons why KL divergence is like an existential crisis wrapped in a #statistics textbook. 🤔✨ Clearly, everyone needs yet another deep dive into the riveting world of mathematical curiosities that are neither symmetric nor intuitive. 🙄📉
https://www.perfectlynormal.co.uk/blog-kl-divergence #mathematics #KLdivergence #existentialcrisis #deepdive #mathematicalcuriosities #HackerNews #ngated -
Mantis Biotech is building digital twins of the human body using AI to solve medicine's data problem. The startup combines data from textbooks, motion capture, biometric sensors and medical imaging, then runs it through a physics engine to create predictive models for medical research, surgical training and injury prevention. https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/30/mantis-biotech-is-making-digital-twins-of-humans-to-help-solve-medicines-data-availability-problem/ #AIagent #AI #GenAI #AIResearch #Mantis
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Daryl Hannah slams Ryan Murphy’s Love Story as ‘tragedy-exploiting’ and ‘textbook misogyny’ https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/mar/06/daryl-hannah-slams-ryan-murphy-jfk-jr-love-story #UsTelevision #DarylHannah #JohnFKennedyJr #RyanMurphy #Television #TelevisionRadio #Film #Culture #UsNews
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The toxic person took her trashy abusive self out of our lives today. It happened shortly after she got pissed off about being called out on phone call where the chief was there. She tried to deflect things & wasn't open to transparency. Then tried to emotionally blackmail my partner again & failed again. Then attempted to hold password to his business & to nonprofit society files hostage until he brought in digital creation guy & got password back. He'll be changing passwords immediately too. Everything I predicted she'd try to do - she did. Textbook covert abusers are somewhat predictable because they use the same manipulative playbooks.
#AbusivePeople hate #transparency. If you're forced to deal with them - ensure you're never alone when communicating with them. Protect yourselves & always have at least one witness around.
